“I Am I.”

That “I am I” seems not to be doubted (outside philosophy!). I am myself and no other. I wake from a troubled dream and soon continue into the day as my old self. “I am I”—how secure and indubitable that sounds, and as a performative assertion of identity it has served and continues to serve us very well. Indeed, how could I not believe in myself! Even the wildly decentered and disoriented character in Beckett’s The Unnameable asserts it against everything to the contrary: “I can’t go on, I must go on.” Of course, our ordinary parlance has the result of promoting the belief in a substantial self behind, as it were, such utterances as “I am speaking,” “he looks that way,” and so on. It may also promote the belief that this self is potentially knowable, an object of knowledge that can, say, be brought forward or mirrored in language. In this way we unwittingly generate the problematic and metaphysically tinged subject that a narrative theory seeks to circumvent. We say “I” as though referring to an active or motivating subject ontologically prior to the action, underlying it (a sub-stance). As Nietzsche stated the matter, “The separation of the ‘deed’ from the doer . . . this ancient mythology established the belief in cause and effect after it had found a firm form in the functions of language and grammar.”¹

Thus, when Descartes discovered his first principle, the ego cogito, he was led to assert thereby that the I spoken of existed (in some sense) prior to the pronouncement, outside the discourse (and outside the Discourse On Method!). We end up with the well-known Cartesian substantial dualism, something that is not well supported by our ordinary experience or modes of comprehension. It is especially the reification and mystification implicit in this Cartesian subject that a narrative account (and perhaps postmodern thought in general) seeks to avoid. This substantial self, I contend, is no more (nor less) than a fiction, which is, in a sense that will become clearer, all the self can ever be. As an implied subject—implied, that is, from acts of expression—the self is a social and linguistic construct, a nexus of meaning rather than an unchanging entity.

Now, the saying of “I” may be an act of repetition, but that it repeats the same self over time can be considered an artful illusion, one reason being that more often than not it is empty of content—in much the same way that Hegel considered Fichte’s self-identical ego to be empty of content. We shall see later that the saying of “I” is not a simple referential and designatory utterance in the way saying “this dog” or “that lamp” can be. “I” may also be devoid of significance or informative content; it is not like saying “English” or “extravagant.” When we are asked what “I” refers to, a common answer is the tautological-sounding “me”! I would claim, on the contrary (and assuming that the statement in fact had a specific sense), that the I does not even coincide with itself; such coincidence is perhaps an unattainable and misguided goal. This point was already prefigured in our discussion of the unavoidable interpretive dimension of memory.

Between consciousness and itself is a certain otherness (an alter ego) that, in an Hegelian Aufhebung, has to be integrated, reconciled with itself. But there is a delay here, a noncoincidence. It is not as though self-consciousness accumulates, expands, or builds up further what it already was, reaching an apex in self-transparency. The Hegelian story is that of a changing habitus, or a changing tradition, where each stage has its attendant sense of self and reality. But it is more than this, for each stage has a certain forgetfulness of its predecessors.² The “I” of today is not necessarily the “I” of tomorrow.

We see that the mere saying of “I” tells us very little about identity and continuity, though it does seem to presuppose them, or at least beg the question of them. The important question to ask someone who says “I” is very often “who?” rather than “what?”—sometimes we ask it of ourselves. Unlike much of philosophy, which often contents itself with the question of what a self is, we must turn toward literature and narrative to learn more concerning who the self is.

Hannah Arendt has particularly stressed the difference between who and what a person is. The latter question is answered, she says, in terms of attributes and qualities (brain surgeon, engineer, brave, thoughtful, intuitive, etc.), but these are properties that one may share with numerous other individuals; this approach overlooks individuality.

Who somebody is or was we can only know by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero—his biography, in other words; everything else we know of him, including the work he may have produced and left behind, tell us only what he is or was. ³

Arendt illustrates her case by alluding to the interesting fact that we know who Socrates was even though we have no actual works of his, whereas the same cannot be said, at least not to the same degree, of Plato or Aristotle. (That one leaves behind an autobiographical work must surely cause us to amend Arendt’s position to some degree. Her argument, however, stresses the whole of a life, and in that case an autobiography cannot possibly be final.)

Properties, as ordinary language suggests, are indeed attributes of someone, of a particular self. But this individual is not the self of some direct introspective scrutiny; it is rather the self of a personal history, of a narrated life. In narrating the acts of an individual we contribute to the creation of that individual as a definite character. As Alasdair Maclntyre has written, “The self inhabits a character whose unity is given as the unity of a character.” This character must therefore be considered in light of a story it belongs to. As Maclntyre also says, “characters in a history are not a collection of persons, but the concept of a person is that of a character abstracted from a history.”⁴ Another way of stating this initially counterintuitive view is that persons are such only if (among other things) they can be considered to have a history, a history of acts and involvements. We may use the term person without knowing that history, but a history is nevertheless always implied.

One reason, presumably, why automatons can be excluded from the category of personhood is because they have no comparable history for themselves. But the manufacture of automatons with some form of memory implant could cause problems for this categorization. The widely known science fiction film Bladerunner is especially informative in this respect, for it poses in a striking way the problem of the experiential similarity of implanted versus real memories. In such a case we may well ask, if one cannot tell the difference between implanted and real memories should this affect our predication of personhood? This problem has clear similarities to the often cited question raised by Russell. If the universe were actually created only a second ago, and we sprung into being fully equipped with memories that appear to date from years back, could we ever know the truth of our genesis? It seems not.

Persons not only have memories, histories, but also take certain attitudes toward them. We notice change—that things and acquaintances are not as they once were. We may enjoy the intimacy of our memories. We show concern over what we remember having done. We despair about losing memories in old age. Factors such as these also contribute to our category of personhood. Now if the attitude of the supposed automaton toward its “memories” is that it simply views them as so much data, then again we may be wary of predicating personhood. There is, perhaps, no single criterion for ascribing personhood to something, and on some of the criteria it may be very difficult to decide one way or the other.

Along similar lines, analytic philosophers are fond of discussing the nature of persons through hypothetical examples of a science fiction sort. Derek Parfit, for example, begins the discussion of personal identity in his book Reasons and Persons by considering the case of someone who is tele-ported to a distant planet.⁵ This operation consists of some form of encoding of the person’s total being and the transmission of these data for reconstitution at another location. The person is of course then totally decomposed at the original location. It must be admitted that while such an example is purely hypothetical, consideration of it may nevertheless reveal important assumptions about our notion of personhood. We might be led to think that the person simply continues his existence at the other location. But suppose the decomposition did not occur; do we then have two persons or one? There is certainly no numerical identity. Is the decomposition at the first site simply the death of that person? Is the other person therefore to be described as a duplicate, a copy? Should we feel guilt, supposing the decomposition did not work, if we had to destroy this duplicate, especially if it is qualitatively identical? Or, more radically, suppose it was you they forgot to decompose at the first site—would you happily be annihilated some time shortly after the transportation? Unless there were some form of “mental” communication or connection between the two, it would seem that they are now two different persons, or soon will be as their lives unfold in different directions.

The question of guilt takes us back to the automaton example. We have fabricated an individual that is identical to other persons, except in respect of having actually lived its past. Whether this latter fact counts against its being a person is very much a matter of our social conditioning and our traditions, our way of understanding. If we reject the onto-theological notion of a soul substance, then presumably other criteria, such as social responsibility, social interaction, and perhaps even procreation, must gain importance, especially if bodily differences do not play a significant role. It is, however, not my aim in this work to address such empirical and hypothetical questions directly other than to show how they may problematize our standard conceptions of identity and personhood.

While we are on the topic of identity, we should say a word or two about Neurath’s ship. Is a ship still the same craft if during a voyage all its planks are gradually replaced by new ones? There is an obvious analogy here to persons, whose cells change considerably during the course of their lives. What is perhaps best asked in such examples is why the issue is difficult to decide. We tend to waver between yes and no on such questions. If we replace a few planks, we tend to think of the boat as the same. If the planks were of a different shape we may think the boat to be different. If the planks were all replaced during one afternoon, we may think it is now a new ship, though from a legal point of view it may still be registered as the same vessel. Coming back to our previous example, two identical ships would not, other than very loosely, be considered the same ship.

The problem here is that our notion of identity is not always a clear-cut matter. We allow for identity in difference. After each use the ship changes, and from year to year so do we. Things change in time, and our notion of identity seeks to find some continuity in this change. Legally, for example, we are considered the same person throughout our lives. But it is conceivable that with the rise, say, in organ transplants the issue of identity could become quite problematic. What this identity or continuity consists in is often relative to the type of entity considered, and relative to the reasons one has for positing identity. Let us now return from this digression and continue our consideration of narrative.

It is no accident that the word person derives from the Latin persona, which has connotations of a character in a play. According to our historically oriented position, the full characterization of who someone is must wait until the action reaches completion, until the play is finished (if it ever is!). This is why Arendt claims that “action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants.”⁶ Presumably, however, the actor can become his or her own storyteller.

What is required here is an ability to extricate or distance oneself from embeddedness in the action and perceive it in the manner of a plot, a history. We often do this when a certain episode of one’s life has reached a (perhaps temporary) conclusion. Though, of course, that our lives have episodes is very often the result of narrative acts that may occur well after the events in question and from a broader perspective than was possible in the past. This is the basis of Arendt’s position.

Perhaps in a Sartrean sense we can say that only when our lives are finished (at death) is our essence complete, and perhaps from a god’s all-encompassing perspective this essence then receives its final meaning. But from a human and hermeneutical point of view this meaning has a considerable margin of flux, for the story of a life can be told in a number of ways; we cannot help but be selective. We may admit, however, that the “truth” is more or less established in people’s minds when a version of the story becomes generally accepted, becomes canonical. We often have such a great desire for the so-called truth that we will overlook its status as a version. Just as we change week by week, year by year, so do our narrations of the past.

The “I” does not fully coincide with itself—this is implied in Arendt’s “backward glance” of the storyteller. Who I am is very often perceived (narrated) by others more clearly than by myself.⁷ Perhaps we should say that there is my story of myself and there are numerous others, some of them from a vantage point superior to my own; consider our epistemic superiority to children as an example.

It may also be the case that the question of who I am often does not arise, and certainly not with any degree of urgency. Why this may be so is not difficult to fathom. One becomes locked into a mode of life that may not change in any essential way for many years. We repeat the same routines. One’s habitus, that fund of practical but implicit and corporeal wisdom, is like an ocean upon which our personal consciousness floats, and where even this consciousness is but a part of that same ocean. One’s home life, one’s work and leisure may enter a routine pattern that one becomes implicitly identified with. If one is at home with and immersed in this life, then the question of “who?” need not arise. We are supported by our ongoing practices, our established meanings. It is often in light of a possible or impending future, or a problem in the present that the question of “who?” is seriously raised. In Proust’s case, for example, we find the desire to perpetuate himself in writing in face of the immanent demise of his physical being and in light of his belief that no part of himself will survive, in a religious sense, this death of his body.

The meaning of my existence can also be a casual thing, fulfilled in the moments of my day-to-day praxis. My self-conception can be shallow and brief, or it can become my overriding concern (as it was for Proust). This variation also applies, of course, to other persons’ conceptions of me. And am I anything other than these various conceptions, these versions, these stories told by and about us?

We see from the above that a good case can be made for distinguishing between what has been called, with relation to literature, the experiencing self and the narrating self.⁸ Generally speaking, in self-understanding the narrating self is always trying to coincide with, or be adequate to, the experiencing self, but this path is easily frustrated or becomes a matter of self-deception. One must first have the means or vocabulary for expression, but then there is the perception of what material is relevant, the choice of when an episode begins and when it ends, the mode or genre of the expression, and numerous other details that can cloud the conversion. We will look at some of these questions in what follows, and especially at the nature of what I have called our prenarrative experience.

The Story of Our Lives

We will now consider in more detail the relation between narrative, time, and experience. For our present purposes, narration can be conceived as the telling (in whatever medium, though especially language) of a series of temporal events so that a meaningful sequence is portrayed—the story or plot of the narrative. It is the nature of a plot, traditionally considered, to synthesize events into a meaningful temporal whole, which it does by some form of closure or completion and by its developmental followability—that is, by giving a beginning, middle, and end structure to the narrative.⁹ Such closure is effected through the resolution (sometimes partial or failed) of aporias that arise in earlier narrative stages. To narrate, then, is to tell the story or history of something or someone and usually involves human or anthropomorphic characters (actors) whose lives are in some respect exhibited.¹⁰ Narrative, furthermore, generally implies the presence of a narrator who is the storyteller, though this may be a covert telling. This latter point is what generally distinguishes narrative from drama.¹¹

Before proceeding, a few explanatory remarks are in order concerning my use of the terms narrative and, more importantly, prenarrative in relation to the human subject. In self-narration the narrator is commonly found in the first-person singular (“I then went to study at university . . .”), and what is related is the life of the narrator. In fact, in spoken autobiographical discourse the character, the narrator, and the author are assumed to be one and the same. Only when the listener suspects falsity or deception will he distinguish between them, particularly between the character portrayed and the author-narrator.¹² With regard to the subject matter of our personal narratives, the thematic material generally relates back, directly or indirectly, to what we are calling the prenarrative aspects of experience. The prenarrative is, in its most general form, the drama we call our lives. As dramatic, our lives cannot always be said to have a narrator, for it is only when, from within the drama, we take up the narrator’s role that the story of our lives is actually told. Earlier, however, I defined this prenarrative as a quasi-narrative, implying that narration has already entered into it. This is indeed the case, for, as I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, we are constantly adopting the narrator’s position with respect to our own lives and also the lives of others.

If, as we have seen, time is fundamentally the time of my life (between birth and death), personal identity will depend upon the continuity of meaningful experience in this life. The physical body may well be the permanent locus of my insertion in the world, and it is indeed a fairly solid basis for continuity, but it is the events that unfold from this locus that generate the meaning of my existence, both through the habitualities it embodies and the history it exhibits. Our lives are not experienced as random unconnected events (though they may be thought so upon reflection), and rarely as a series of such events. Actions are, generally speaking, already understood in the context of a before and after. Life is inherently of a narrative structure, a structure that we make explicit when we reflect upon our past and our possible future.¹³

The actions of human agents, to be intelligible, must be seen against the background of a history, a history of causes and goals, of failures, achievements, and aspirations. As Maclntyre writes, “The notion of a history is as fundamental as the notion of an action. Each requires the other.”¹⁴ Actions do not occur in a void and are not meaningful in and of themselves; their meaning is dependent on the broader perspective of a framing story, as events in a history.¹⁵ We must ourselves know such a personal history if we are to make intelligent choices in the present.

It is a throughgoing characteristic of our lives that we view our actions as either beginning something (as a means) or as the conclusion of something. Practical reason itself shares this teleological structure of paths to envisioned goals. As Ricoeur states the matter, “An event is not only an occurrence, something that happens, but a narrative component.”¹⁶ I would further maintain that this particular narrative way of sequentializing is basic to the process of human understanding, especially as this is directed to acting, social persons. To understand a life is to trace its development upon a narrative thread, a thread that unites otherwise disparate or unheeded happenings into the significance of a development, a directionality, a destiny. We might again turn to Ricoeur: “The ability to follow a story constitutes a very sophisticated form of understanding.”¹⁷ That one is or becomes unable to do this for oneself will therefore promote the psychological consequence of our possibly experiencing a lack of development, of unity, and of directionality. We shall return to this conclusion in more detail when we look at some facets of contemporary psychoanalysis.

Time and memory, as I presented them in the preceding chapter, do not themselves constitute personal identity; they rather serve as the environment from which narrative structuration is possible. Explicit narratives are, one might say, of a higher order than the elements of temporality and memory from which they are usually woven, and it is this order that we need to explore in what follows.

It is as a character in our (and other people’s) narratives that we achieve an identity. Ricoeur has made the same point:

Our own existence cannot be separated from the account we can give of ourselves. It is in telling our own stories that we give ourselves an identity. We recognize ourselves in the stories that we tell about ourselves. It makes very little difference whether these stories are true or false, fiction as well as verifiable history provides us with an identity.¹⁸

Implied in this statement is that the self is generated and is given unity in and through its own narratives, in its own recounting and hence understanding of itself. The self, and this is a crucial point, is essentially a being of reflexivity, coming to itself in its own narrational acts.

This conclusion can be seen as an important outcome of Ricoeur’s basic hermeneutic stance: “there is no self-knowledge without some kind of detour through signs, symbols and cultural works, etc.”¹⁹ Who I am is not given outside of such mediated expression. But, as we shall come to see, this is a case of expression creating being and not merely reporting or mirroring it after the fact. The self is not some precultural or presymbolic entity that we seek simply to capture in language. In other words, I am, for myself, only insofar as I express myself.

We might, however, still ask about experience itself , prior to being narrated. What is prenarrative experience? Is it not perhaps falsified when narrated? Does language impose its own cultural forms of expression on this stratum? There have been varying views on this topic. On one extreme is the influential position of Louis Mink: “Stories are not lived but told. Life has no beginnings, middles, or ends. . . .”²⁰ Thus if life has any narrative structure, claims Mink, it is one we have put there after the fact. He continues: “We do not dream or remember in narrative . . . but tell stories which weave together the separate images of recollection. . . . So it seems truer to say that narrative qualities are transferred from art to life.” For Mink, storytelling is a mode of comprehension (of grasping together) that necessarily takes second place in relation to the experiences comprehended.

On the other extreme we find Maclntyre: “we all live out narratives in our lives and . . . we understand our own lives in terms of the narrative that we live out. . . .”²¹ For Maclntyre narratives are inextricable from experience. Barbara Hardy, the literary theorist, also argues in this manner: “We dream in narrative, day-dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative.”²² The disagreement between Mink and Maclntyre can perhaps be resolved if we consider the relation between implicit and explicit narratives, though much of what I have so far said should discredit Mink’s absolute severing of narrative from experience. We have already noted, for example, the narrational nature of recollection and the way temporality assumes a historical form linked to our purposes. Ricoeur is, I think, more rigorous in his analysis of the question of the relation between narrative and experience than either Mink or Maclntyre; his analysis can in fact serve to locate the other views more precisely.

Ricoeur’s stance is in certain respects intermediary, though admittedly sometimes ambiguous. Narration is the imaginative act that configures a more primordial experience into something with meaning and structure: “the plots that we invent help us to shape our confused, formless and in the last resort mute temporal experience.”²³ This sounds extremely close to Mink. More recently, however, Ricouer maintains that this primordial experience has a “prenarrative quality” or prefiguredness that “constitutes a demand for narrative.”²⁴

His current position can best be summed up by an opening remark from the first volume of Time and Narrative:

Time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience.²⁵

Let us try to unpack this quotation. Human time, as we saw from Husserl, is not the bare temporality of succession; it is a succession that already has various imports for the individual(s) concerned—it already has “features.” We have already remarked that time is cut through with human values (“good times,” “bad times,” etc.), and in that time is already keyed to our purposes and therefore valorized, it must have been experienced in a contextualized form. For example, the present is “good” because something has turned out or is turning out well. Already there is in experience an implicit narrative structure and hence understanding. Our explicit narratives may indeed extend, even change, the meaning of our lived time, but this time is already structured according to our style of being-in-the-world, our habitus. As such, our narrative interpretations do not function ex nihilo but follow naturally upon the structure of experience.

If the temporality of human affairs is indeed experienced at its basic level within a teleological setting, then it is perhaps only narrative understanding that can do it justice. To narrate oneself is to make explicit this prenarrative or “prefigured” (Ricoeur) quality of our unexamined life, to draw out a story it embodies. This is to say that our unexamined life is already a quasi-narrative, and that lived time is already a drama of sorts. Also, and this is quite important, this quasinarrative can and does serve as a corrective or guide for the act of narration. One cannot tell just any old story without committing some form of injustice to the content of one’s experience—what Sartre called “bad faith.” As David Carr has written,

Many of our plans go awry (and stories have to be rewritten) because we make mistakes about the past, about what happened and what we have done. The past does constrain us; it does have a fixedness that allows reinterpretation only up to certain limits.²⁶

Lived time already has a quasi-narrative character, and this is why it is not amenable to just any telling. One fabricates one’s past at one’s own risk—at the risk of one’s self. Involved in such narrations can be both psychologically harmful factors associated with self-deception and repression and socially harmful ones associated with lying to and deceiving other people.

While Ricoeur does not go as far as I would like on the question of the quasi-narrative character of lived experience, he certainly goes partway. In the end he is willing (against Mink) “to accord already to experience as such an inchoate narrativity that does not proceed from projecting, as some say, literature on life but that constitutes a genuine demand for narrative.”²⁷ This is an interesting intermediary position. Ricoeur is not saying experience lacks a narrative structure, but he is also not saying it always has a fully developed or explicit one. The point, if I am correct in my interpretation, is that experience naturally goes over into narration, which is very different from saying that narrative structures are imposed on experience. We have here a dialectic of the preexpressed and the expressed, where neither party is alien to the other. Narratives, for Ricoeur, are justified by the felt need for the untold stories of our lives to be told,²⁸ though he is, I believe, overly cautious and too brief in his discussion of this point. Such caution leads Carr, for example, to assimilate Ricoeur, wrongly in my opinion, to the camp of Mink. Our own position seeks to draw out the details and implications of what we see to be Ricoeur’s middle position. It might be helpful at this point to take a brief look at some relevant aspects of Ricoeur’s project in Time and Narrative.²⁹

The three volumes of Time and Narrative are concerned with articulating the important and often overlooked role that emplotment plays in our experience of temporality. Its effect, much like that of metaphor in Ricoeur’s earlier work, is the refiguration of experience. Emplotment, in histories and fictions, takes a prefigured world of events and actions and draws out or proposes a configuration that serves to organize worldly events into meaningful sequences and purposes. This textual structure is in turn the mediating cause of the reader refiguring his or her own world in light of the possibilities offered by experiencing the world of the text. The progression from prefigured to configured and refigured receives a technical elaboration in Time and Narrative in terms of three stages of mimetic representation: mimesis, (the everyday world of action), mimesis₂ (the stage of creative narrative configuration), and mimesis₃ (the appropriation of the work of mimesis₂ to the world of the reader).

These three inseparable mimetic levels serve to define the genesis of a human time which, claims Ricoeur, “is nothing other than narrated time” (3:102). This narrated time is reducible to neither cosmological (or objective) time nor subjective time (as explored by Husserl) but generates an additional and synthetic dimension to our temporal experience. Especially notable here is the historicization of our horizon of experience by the narrative work of historians. Narrative for Ricoeur, be it historical or fictional, involves a “search for concordance [that] is part of the unavoidable assumptions of discourse and communication” (2:28). Narration draws a figure out of the materials of everyday life but only, finally, in order that the story it unfolds returns back to and reconfigures that life. It is this point that is central to our above discussion. Narration should not be seen as creating order where there once was pure chaos or dissonance (1:72). Mimesis₂ configures what was already prefigured, and is not only a creative act but also one of discovery (2:76). The level of mimesis, already has a considerable degree of narrative structuration that allows actions to be viewed within a purposive and historical dimension. This structuration becomes even more apparent if we consider the point mentioned above, that mimesis₃ feeds back into the life-world of the reader, for structuration at the level of mimesis₁ is very much the product of earlier configurative acts that have been appropriated by the individual or taken on by society in general.

One has only to consider the remark “Traditions are essentially narratives” (3:260) to see the pervasiveness for Ricoeur of narrative structure at the level of everyday experience. This is not, however, to claim that we maintain a continual consciousness of the traditions we are embedded in, only that they have a certain intelligibility and a history that could be discovered and articulated; that is why we have used the term quasinarrative for this domain. In what follows we shall pursue some further aspects of the relevance of narrative and narration to ordinary life.

Narration of oneself, because of the quasi-narrative character of ordinary life, may be both a receptive and a creative activity. If we turn to recollection we can clearly see a receptive and an active stage. Receptively our memories may already generate a broken narrative of images and meaning as they first enter conscious awareness. Often we do not have cause to notice just how broken and incomplete this recollection can be, for the fragments may nevertheless exhibit a quasi-narrative or dramatic structure that satisfies our need for meaning. (The same phenomenon may apply to dreams. No matter how disjointed, fragmented, or plain crazy the dream may be to later reflection, during the dream there is very often a definite sense of a plot unfolding.) But, as was earlier stressed, interpretation is inherent to recollection, and already this fragmented and schematic narrative is being filled out with a present meaning, is configured for me now.

Interpretation, like understanding, is a continuous process with no precise starting point. We cannot say of recollection that here is the bare content, and here is where interpretation and meaning start.³⁰ This situation is a primary problem for those who would maintain with Mink that there is experience on one hand and narrative interpretation on the other. Rather, interpretation has always already started.

Life, with a minimum of explicit narrative, approaches a sheer undergoing, like a child who does not consciously link A to B as it lives through them. This need not be William James’s “confusion,” for habitualities, motor actions, and our general life-style can serve us well as far as implicit structure is concerned, but the broader significance of one’s experiences might thereby be unformed or lost—as indeed much of one’s childhood is. We might now ask: but where does this broader significance reside? The answer can only be that it is generated through the narrative act itself. This important creative component is often overlooked. To narrate is to link A to B, to see causal affinities, to draw out and develop comparisons and harmonies, to deduce and project possible outcomes. As Ricoeur says, “To make a plot is already to make the intelligible spring from the accidental, the universal from the singular, the necessary or the probable from the episodic.”³¹

Whereas the young child does not set out to consciously narrate but only runs through sequences of images (basic memory retrieval, or Piaget’s picture consciousness), adults are already well initiated into a broad semiological realm. We already have language, we have been told stories, we have seen and read them; we are therefore no longer innocent in this respect. Our world is a progressively cultural one, where even nature is a cultural concept with a varying history. To quote Ricoeur once more: “We belong to history before telling stories or writing history. The game of telling is included in the reality told.”³² This is a very important insight, one that backs up our earlier interpretation of Ricoeur’s position on narrative. We might say that we are “story-telling animals” precisely because we are already caught up in a story, and already committed to meaning.

One reason we narrate is because mankind cannot fail at times to ask the question of its own being, because we know the story is there to be told—just as others have told it. But there is also, as Ricoeur stresses, the desire to make the inchoate intelligible, and we know that narrative understanding is traditionally suited to this task, as literature clearly shows. Our point in arguing for a quasi-narrative level is precisely that “telling is included in the reality told.” We are both experiencers and narrators (often pretty much at the same time), for the act of making intelligible is a more or less continuous one, even though the narratives may be appropriated from elsewhere. It is this continuity of our life story that constitutes the greater part of our experienced self-identity. Our identity is that of a particular historical being, and this identity can persist only through the continued integration of ongoing experience. Because we bring our history along with us, as a more or less clearly configured horizon, new experiences will tend to How into this story of our lives, augmenting it and adapting themselves to it.

At the broadest and most abstract level this identity is constituted out of the part-whole relation between the “now” and the at least implicit horizon of my life as a whole. The mere fact of situating the now within such a frame is already enough to generate an identity, and one need not know much about the life itself for this relation to operate. Let us consider an example. You are listening to a piece of music at a concert. Even though you may not be able to identify specific themes and their development up to the present, even if you find the piece disjointed and disagreeable and even if the opening sections are forgotten, one can still have the continuous and indubitable awareness of listening to the same piece of music. Identity can indeed persist despite a considerable failure to grasp the more particular content of experience. In the case of a concert, one continually has the broad referential frame of the piece beginning, coupled with an awareness that the clapping signaling the end of the piece has not yet taken place. A breakdown of this type of self-identity will occur if the part-whole relation breaks down.

Such a disruption of identity often occurs in dreams, and accounts for much of their strangeness. Consider a case where one is fully cognizant of having a now, but where one does not know what frame of reference the now belongs to, in both its spatial and temporal dimensions (i.e., not knowing the general “where” of the current event, and not knowing its temporal context, such as “my life”). In a dream our identity will still rely on a part-whole relation, but if the whole is not a very great expanse and if it often changes dimensions, then one’s identity can become disturbingly volatile and episodic. Amnesia will produce a similar result in waking life. Similarly, a catastrophic event, such as war, may simply destroy the credibility of one’s prior life horizon, resulting in a temporary or even a more permanent disruption of identity. Simply waking up in an alien surrounding (e.g., while on holiday) can momentarily unsettle the part-whole gestalt.

Applying these insights to the above notion of life story, we can see that, as for the music example, self-identity may persist in our lives even though particular events and episodes do not mesh together well at all. Such an identity may be grounded on the framing story of life in its most general features, e.g., birth and death as two limits—“they were born, they lived, and they died” is a biography that fits us all. What falls between these two poles becomes part of my life, and that means part of what is considered a unitary phenomenon. This identity, it should be noted, is not the persistence of an entity, a thing (substance, subject, ego), but is a meaning constituted by a relation of figure to ground or part to whole. It is an identity in difference constituted by framing the flux of particular experiences by a broader story.

This continuous, though often implicit, awareness of our identity is an important phenomenon, all we may need in our day-to-day lives, but it requires filling out if our identity is to become more particular and rich. Indeed, we generally know far more of our broad life story than its two limits. It is this still unfolding, developing, even fragmenting story that forms the backdrop of our present. Whereas the birth-death scheme has little content but considerable stability, our particular stories have far greater content but may make little sense to us as a whole. But let us now return to our discussion of the prenarrative.

It should be obvious that there is a dialectic between the prenarrated and the narrated. Narrative is not simply the making public of what already exists in a preexpressed though privately cognized form. What must be stressed, against Mink, is that narrative is a realm of intelligibility that we are already involved in, explicitly and implicitly. But we must not be misled into thinking that the function of a narrative is to report the “facts” of our lives as they were. This sort of simple recounting was disparaged in chapter 1. To narrate experience is, as Ricoeur emphasizes, to refigure it, to tell it in a certain way, and often for a certain end. Self-narration is, as we have previously stressed, both a receptive and a creative-interpretive act. Narration both excludes certain phenomena and dwells on others; it is unavoidably selective. This selectivity is clearly manifested at the level of practical action. Certain acts contribute in a productive way to achieving a goal, while others are abortive. Certain people and events are instrumental to our destiny, while others are not. Again, many of our daily tasks are routine and mundane, performed in a like fashion by numerous other people in their daily lives. Narrative may of course recount these banal daily events, but a story traditionally seeks the exceptional and formative (while perhaps seeking the exemplary and universal).

In considering what prenarrative experience is like we are treading close to what Wilfrid Sellers has called the myth of the given, the myth that there is a realm of experience prior to, and amenable to, expression in language. But we need not go this far. Language, culture, and, as Heidegger has shown, understanding cannot be subtracted from experience without doing violence to our humanity. Our experience is already what we have called a quasi-narrative, a story to be told and one that is partially told already. We need only consider the sophistication of dreams to see just how far narrative is a part of our constitution. Barbara Hardy, in the passage cited earlier, indicates the pervasiveness of narrative emplotment, and at a level that is not explicitly reflective. In other words, we often undergo experience in narrative sequences quite automatically, without choice. These may not be the full-blown narratives of autobiographies or stories, but they can serve in the same way to generate understanding, direction, and unity in our lives.

We tend explicitly to narrate longer temporal sequences only when the situation calls for it. Perhaps a dilemma calls for a reassessment of our project, or a lover asks for our history, or maybe we are in psychotherapy. If we are not always narrating ourselves in order to understand who we are, it is because this second-order reflection is not necessarily required for everyday praxis. We do not, for example, need continually to reformulate or consciously remember our initial rationale or desires to continue meaningfully a present action to its conclusion; this could even be counterproductive. Much of the time our identity is not a concern for us because it is unthematically supported by the regularities in our day-to-day experience: our body, work, friends, home, and general style of living. In addition, our narratives are often no more than verbal tokens, stating, for example, name, address, occupation, and the like. These latter examples are narratives only in a weak sense, for while they are indeed narrated they nevertheless contain no real story or personal history; they do not connect with our prenarrative temporal experience. To be satisfied with such “narratives” is to be satisfied with a shallow sense of one’s own existence and personal identity.

Hardy states some further instances of narrative in her list. I have already referred to dreams, and that the same applies to daydreams should be quite clear. To daydream is preeminently to construct a narrative story, one that weaves language and pictorial fantasy together into the forms of our desire. But daydreams can easily pass over into the images of anticipation, hope, hatred, and despair, each of which develops along the beginning-middle-end structure of a narrative. I want to consider emotion in more detail both because of its importance in our lives and because its structure carries over into many of the above areas.

Narrative and Emotion

If human experience indeed has a quasi-narrative nature (prior to our “imposition” of art on life), then we ought to be able to substantiate this claim by discovering in our emotional life a throughgoing and essential narrative ingredient. We shall primarily be appealing to the work of Charles Taylor to support this view. Throughout, we will also be interested in the implications of this position for our sense of self, and especially for our self-understanding.

Much of our emotional life is bound up with the way we narrate experiences (both past and present). It would be difficult, for example, to imagine someone experiencing guilt, joy, or anxiety without having some cognizance of the events to which these emotions are the responses, and beyond this to the story in which the events take on significance. As I have argued, the narration of events is not a simple description of “facts” but an interpretive activity—it is an important way in which our experiences are understood, are given form and meaning. Prior to some degree of narration, the meaning of human events for us is obscure or simply absent. This situation is like comparing a chronicle to a full historical narrative; the chronicle merely states occurrences whose further relevance remains to be interpreted. If, therefore, narration is linked to emotions, then emotions are likely to be keyed to, or dependent on, the type of interpretation we give of events in our lives.

Taylor’s essay “Self-Interpreting Animals” offers useful insights into the relation between language, narrative, and emotion.³³ Many important feelings or emotions are, he claims, self-referential in that they arise from a certain articulated awareness of one’s life situation. As the various imports on this linguistic level of description change, so do the correlative feelings. An inflicted wound, for example, tends to be felt as painful no matter what we think (i.e., is not narratively self-referential), but that this leads to the further and more distinctly human feeling of anxiety, say, or indignation toward one’s assailant will very much depend upon one’s articulation of the meaning the event has in its broader context; it will also depend on a certain preunderstanding of oneself. These latter, “higher” types of emotion are, Taylor maintains, a product of interpretation and are properly self-referential.

To use an example of Taylor’s: if we were unable to experience shame, then “a world without beings capable of this kind of experience would be one without any aspiration to dignity” (SA, p. 53), for the experience of shame is manifest only against the background of leading a life where one desires a certain respect from others. “Thus the import of shameful can be explicated only by reference to a subject who experiences his world in a certain way” (SA, p. 53). Emotions like shame must, therefore, be viewed as an indication of “what is important to us qua subjects . . ., what we value, or what matters to us” (SA, p. 60), even though we may be only partially aware of this background. It is because of this self-referential element, this reference to the broader life of the subject, that such higher emotions, says Taylor, “do not fit into an objectivist’s view of the world” (SA, p. 55). If this claim is true, then at least some emotions cannot be reduced to bodily states that the predelineated subject simply endures, but are, on a narrative account, part and parcel of what it means to be a subject.

To see the central place of narrative in emotional experience we must pursue Taylor’s analysis a little further. The types of emotion he is concerned with all involve some degree of interpretive articulation, which, because of the reflexivity to the subject’s life, is also a form of self-understanding. In brief, such emotions are language dependent: “To say that language is constitutive of emotion is to say that experiencing an emotion essentially involves seeing that certain descriptions apply” (SA, p. 71).³⁴ What this implies is that the emotion is concomitant with an articulated judgment concerning a given state of affairs. One sees, via something like Santayana’s moral imagination, that a situation is “bad” or “degrading” and one experiences therefore the attendant affect. The important point to be noted here is that the initial insight into the context or implicit story is inseparably bound up with the resultant emotion.

Emotions also have a life history, for they change during the course of our developing understanding:

The remorse may dissipate altogether, if we come to see that our sense of wrong-doing is unfounded; or it may alter in other ways, as we come to understand what is wrong; perhaps it will be more acute as we see how grave the offence was; perhaps it will be less as we see how hard it was to avoid. (SA, p. 63)

This account is reminiscent of our earlier discussion of the relation between the prenarrative drama and the explicit narrative level. Very often the “truth” of one does not carry over into the other, and we must continually adjust our story until we are satisfied that “this is how it was.” Experienced satisfaction and a sense of adequacy are major arbiters here, though they should not be assimilated to a naive representational theory.

Emotional experiences are, however, not only the result of interpretive emplotment but also the occasion for it. In promoting interpretation, emotions “open us to the domain of what it is to be human” (SA, p. 64). Language, in articulating the import of emotions, discloses what is important to us in our lives (what we get upset, angry, or excited about, and so on) and will serve to define our own character, our values, and our relationship to others. But it should be remembered that this articulation may in turn, as we saw above, change the emotion itself.

Taylor concludes by considering our experience of inarticulate emotion, for this would seem to be a case where the language paradigm falters. He puts the question as follows: “We might be tempted to think of animals as experiencing inarticulately what we give names to” (SA, p. 74). But such inarticulate emotions, Taylor claims, are already unterwegs zur Sprache by their very nature, for what characterizes such experiences is precisely their demand for interpretation: “We experience our pre-articulate emotion as perplexing, as raising a question. And this is an experience that no non-language animal can have” (SA, p. 74). Taylor’s reason for this demand follows from a position parallel to Heidegger’s emphasis on the ontological primacy of both language and understanding. Says Taylor:

Because as language-animals we are already involved in understanding it [emotion/feeling]; we already have incorporated into our language an interpretation of what is really important. And it is this articulation . . . which makes our inarticulate feelings into questions. (SA, p. 74)

Understanding is, we can say, a natural goal in the development of our inarticulate feelings, much as the inchoate episodes of our life, as we saw from Ricoeur, seem to demand narrative emplotment for their understanding and development.

Subject-referring emotions always occur within a social matrix of goals and aspirations, aspirations that naturally achieve clarity and definition in language and often at the instigation of prior emotions that reveal value directions in our lives. Emotions can thereby bring us to ourselves in their demand for understanding; they very often demand a narrative to be unfolded which gives meaning to their manifestation and, thereby, an interpretation to our lives. But it is an already more or less explicit narrative understanding that promulgates our higher-level affective responses from the very start. We have already seen a foundation for this understanding in the prenarrative character of lived experience. Taylor’s “we already have incorporated into our language an interpretation of what is really important” specifically points to the extraindividual narratives-beliefs-ideologies that form the very core of any society.

It should be readily apparent that Taylor’s account of emotion is directly applicable to a discussion of, say, hope and despair, and can even be carried over to certain forms of doubt and belief (speaking again on the level of self-referential states). All such states make sense only against a background emplotment, against a drama one is cognizant of. One hopes for a possible future, one that is already imaginatively delineated, whereas a situation that is hopeless is one where an expected or wished-for drama is not being realized, not coming to fruition. In each case one’s hopes and aspirations are already linguistically and imagistically mediated in a narrative fashion, and may involve the call to a further understanding, to further development.

Another way of stating that such states are self-referential is to say, borrowing from Gabriel Marcel, that they reflect something we are and not merely something we have. Our body, as Marcel has shown, functions ambiguously in both of these modes, depending on the perspective we adopt toward it. For example, we may be in pain owing to an accident, but we do not regard the pain as disclosing in some way our personal identity, our selves; it is simply something fairly impersonal we have or are forced to undergo. On the other hand, we consider the higher emotions as disclosive of our natures as individual, goal-directed social begins (for example, in the specific way we deal with pain).

These self-referential states are important because, to quote Taylor, “they ascribe a form to what matters to us” (SA, p. 64). In other words, such states point to or embody important value directions, and in this respect they have moral relevance, especially as our affective states usually relate to the acts of other persons as well as to ourselves. Emotional states must therefore be considered as evaluative, and we have a long tradition that links one’s moral leanings to what is particularly characteristic of the human individual.

Taylor sums up his essay:

Human emotion is interpreted emotion, which is nevertheless seeking its adequate form. This is what is involved in seeing man as a self-interpreting animal. It means that he cannot be understood simply as an object among objects, for his life incorporates an interpretation, an expression of which cannot exist unexpressed, because the self that is to be interpreted is essentially that of a being who self interprets. (SA, p. 75, my emphasis)

The human subject, as the existentialists have long maintained, is an unfinished subject. But perhaps more than this it is a subject that continually writes, develops, and often erases its own definition, its story. What lies behind our self-conceptions is not some identical thing-in-itself (soul, self, spirit, ego, etc., though these can have a place within a narratological theory), but rather language as it derives from our sedimented history, especially the autobiographical language of self-narration. If I am a being who self-interprets, then it is to the interpreting itself that we should turn; we should not think that we can escape this circularity by recourse to a self external or transcendent to this act.

I am not saying, nor is Taylor, that consciousness equals language. It is rather the case that the various orders of human reality are invariably cut through with language and that the diversity and depth of experienced meaning in our lives is preeminently a result of our linguistic and storytelling nature, or at least has articulation and conceptual understanding as a goal.³⁵ Much of this experienced meaning, however, derives from our linguistic-cultural heritage and may remain in the background in ordinary praxis—just as our developing life story may remain horizonal. A self-interpreting animal is one that can define itself anew, that can discard or embellish its old definitions. As self-interpreters we therefore have responsibility for our selves, for the selves we were and the selves we would wish to become.

Before we examine the status of the narrating subject in more detail, it will be instructive to conclude this chapter on narrative by considering an important area that has been only a side issue in my preceding account: the relation between narrative and morality. It should be clear, especially from literature, that stories (fictional or otherwise) do not recount a mere string of details that have no human interest; nor do they describe events in an objective or neutral fashion (no matter what the author’s avowed intention may be). Narratives grow out of a social milieu and cannot help but reflect and augment (positively or negatively) its values and concerns. We shall also see that one’s personal narrative is woven into a social structure, and is not fully of one’s own making.

The Virtue of Narrative

Each human life traces out a complex figure that necessarily intersects and interacts with the figures of others.³⁶ Social action therefore immediately involves us in various plots and subplots, many of which we are only passively entangled in. We have already outlined the prenarrative quality of experience, and there is more to be said about it. This social matrix of plots is the material, or subtext, out of which our more explicit self-reflections are formed along their narrative threads, both retrospectively and prospectively. In this respect, we might say that narration is a secondary process,³⁷ that of a story becoming known, becoming explicit. But although narration is a secondary process, it is an essential one with respect to human understanding because it places acts in relation to each other and discloses those Gestalten and continuities without which understanding would prove infertile.

To narrate the figure of the past is, in addition, to attempt a retrieval of ourselves on the plane of self-understanding. It is to create a portrait of ourselves, no matter how badly delineated. Without this recuperative act there would be little or no content to the “I” that I am for myself; there would not be the reflection that is so characteristic of human agents. As Taylor has written, “there is no such thing as what [human beings] are, independently of how they understand themselves.”³⁸ It is a question of what, in reflection, we make of our situation vis-a-vis the past, present, and future. Our conceptions (disclosed in stories) may even reveal a multiplicity of selves; this is a phenomenon more common than is often suspected, and one I shall say more about later.

Self-portrayal is a form of what might be called representation, where this does not imply a mirroring of the past but rather a generation of something that stands for the past (or myself in the past); what I previously called a representative. The mirroring relation is not, however, totally alien to our experience, for our tellings are very often retellings, where one story may or may not reflect or correspond to another from a prior date (or to another person’s account). In this respect there is often considerable intertextuality in our remembering—the tale is retold, and relates to little but a prior telling. In fact, much of what we remember is simply a prior remembering, a prior emplotment.

There are many reasons why experience gets narrated or represented, some of which I have alluded to in earlier sections, but in the realm of social action this is primarily because, as Ricoeur remarks, “human lives need and merit being narrated.”³⁹ The “need” is manyfold and ties in not only with constituting our identity (as an individual, as a nation, etc.), but also with justifying our very existence, our acts (Sartre’s Nausea, for example, concludes on this note). This form of narrating is a sort of moral imperative.

Narratives also reveal aspects or “truths” of our life that would otherwise remain obscure or simply unconstituted. Human lives “merit” narration not only because they can be exemplary and heroic but also because they should not be forgotten: “The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative,” claims Ricoeur.⁴⁰ In this respect one need only remember the holocaust and the literature it gave rise to, or rather demanded (the poetry of Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, for example). Finally, we might also add to this list of reasons for narration that human lives are quite simply intrinsically interesting.

Human action is valorized action, if only because it involves choice and deliberation, and it is narration that carries over to explicit consciousness action’s implicit moral tenor and attempts to preserve it. This is, of course, a virtue of novels and biographies over philosophical discourse. It is especially in novels that we discover a whole gamut of possible moral values and positions, a great number of which we might not otherwise come upon and understand. Without narration the past would sink into an obscurity of forgetfulness wherein everything becomes equal. Narrative, however, not only delivers over the past but is also the medium of our aspirations and desires, imaginatively expressing, in the stories we tell ourselves and those others that we hear and read, a possible future with its attendant joys and hardships and, hence, possible selves.

The stories we tell are part and parcel of our becoming. They are a mode of vision, plotting what is good and what is bad for us, what is possible and what is not—plotting who we may become. But in the telling we seem also to be immediately involved in generating the value of a certain state of affairs or course of action, of judging its worth, ethical or otherwise. We have already explained how recollection does not simply describe but tends also to dramatize human events, and in so doing it places them in hierarchical relations to each other, even if this only amounts to raising certain material to momentary prominence. In the sphere of social action this valorization understandably takes the form of moral judgment and critique, contributing thereby to the ethical realm of our existence. This ethical aspect of narration, taken somewhat broadly, is what I now wish to consider.

It was a general thesis of George Santayana that neither perception nor experience can be reperceived or remembered; they can only be imaginatively reconstructed, dramatized in images and words. He gives the name “literary psychology” to this sphere: “Scientific psychology is a part of physics, or of the study of nature; it is the record of how animals act. Literary psychology is the art of imagining how they think and feel.” Scientific psychology, as Santayana defined it, addresses the animate world in terms of observable (at least theoretically) material events, whereas literary psychology addresses these same events as they are “transposed into the broad realm of experienced significance on the part of conscious human subjects.” This significance needs to be apprehended, says Santayana, “dramatically, by imitative sympathy,” where it is especially this intersubjective sympathetic element that escapes the purview of an objective science: “literary psychology, however far scientific psychology may push it back, always remains in possession of the moral field.”⁴¹ Such moral values, as we shall see, are very much a product of how experience is reconstituted and sustained in our narrative reflections. We have already had occasion to mention, in this respect, Santayana’s important notion of the “moral imagination.”

What follows from the above brief account is that values are very much indigenous to the story, to the way in which events are related, and can only be abstracted from this context secondarily. In the same way that emotions generally vary with our articulated understanding of events (and vice versa), so does the value attending those events. It would not be pertinent to our topic of narrative to enter into a detailed discussion of the relation between emotion and value, but it should be clear that in experience we cannot really separate emotion and value; together they contribute to the meaning or significance our life has in most, if not all, of its less mundane episodes. What “literary psychology” and “moral imagination” seek to display in their narrative reconstructions is precisely this significance, and it is an endeavor closely paralleled by the novelist’s enterprise.

A primary difference between literature and the world of concrete action is of course that the significance of the latter often demands immediate physical action from us (we must respond, say, with more than just understanding and compassion), and this reaction may bring about further responses (tied to our concrete involvement and ability to act), though not always. Many events that we hear of and many that we witness do not demand our practical intervention, and in this respect they may closely resemble our response to what we may read. The text or plots of life may result in much the same responses as do literary texts, and this is especially true on the level of valuation. This is why art can imitate life and vice versa, with advantages gained by both. In life and art, narrative and significance work in a symbiotic relationship. For example, the story (or memory) may call forth the emotional response. Likewise, the emotion may call forth the story (or the memory). Thus writers will often let the unfolding plot determine the emotional-valuational result, but they may also guide the plot in light of a response they wish to attain, a value they wish to exemplify. Either way, in life as in art there is an interweaving of narrative and significance (value).

Values arise in the drama of our life, especially in the choices this life involves. It should be understandable, then, why dramatization is the form of expression most adequate to the direct disclosure of human action in its social and moral significance, and hence for disclosing individuals in their characteristic (and valorized) traits and identities: as villainous, heroic, vain, humble, and so on. In the relating of actual human lives, dramatization must of course occur after the fact. As Arendt has written, the “unchangeable identity of a person, though disclosing itself intangibly in act and speech, becomes tangible only in the story of the actor’s and speaker’s life.”⁴² One is reminded here of Ulysses narrating his own past endeavors and trials to the Phaiakeans.

There appears to be some truth in saying, as Max Scheler did, that “the whole person is contained in every fully concrete act.”⁴³ But it is true only for someone who can then interpret those acts into meaningful sequences, someone who can “see” or imagine the broader story. For as we have seen, the significance of human action is understood in and through the reflection that the acts give rise to, from the context or framing story in which they fit. It is not that the self is behind the acts, visible and fully formed at their inception; the self is rather a result of actions, something that actions imply.

Again we are back at the implicit story that is waiting, as it were, to be told, to be revealed, and that on being revealed will disclose the implied subject of the actions (the actor) in his or her valorized dimensions. This revelation is, as we have seen, always interpretive, not the neutral description of a prior and nonlinguistic objectivity. Another way of saying this is that the self is a “reference” produced via the interpretation, projected by it. Ricoeur uses a similar notion when he talks of the world set up by a literary text as its “productive reference”—allowing him to circumvent naive objectivism.⁴⁴

Given that the self belongs in a teleological (though perhaps fairly short-range) and storylike framework, it seems necessary that one’s life exhibit something like a unity of purpose if it is not to be fragmented (or multiple) and unstable. It is on this level of purposes and intentions that our characteristic human identity, personal identity, is especially evident, for it is here that value determinations relating to the form of life that we lead are disclosed; as Taylor contends, “our identity is defined by our fundamental evaluations.”⁴⁵ Telling a person’s story tends invariably to plot the type of moral agent he or she is or was; it reveals the value directions in his or her life by selectively plotting only those actions relevant or tributary to certain central purposes.

In the same way that a story traditionally demands followability and closure, we tend to expect unity and continuity in other people’s lives and in our own. No matter how disorganized and disjunct a life may appear, the biographer’s art, like reflection generally, has always been to “reduce” diversity to a perhaps hidden unity, a purpose, central disposition, or group of problems that even the actor may not have been aware of. Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis, for example, makes this point (while, however, contradicting some of his other more relativistic claims!). A story that does not provide us with such a unity is usually regarded as a failed or incomplete story. A life may similarly be considered incomplete; it is a life that does not facilitate some degree of final understanding and judgment. Although there are some obvious problems with this traditional position aimed at unity and closure, it nevertheless still affords insight into the function of narrative in this area.

In our own lives, and in our own self-understanding, the achievement of unity is usually considered necessary for our identity; and in our social life, unity of purpose and consistency of valuation form part of what it means to be a responsible moral agent. Responsibility accrues to a person who can evaluate possible acts with respect to their worth, as noble or base, as cowardly or courageous, and so on. In this realm one cannot help but appeal to an already constituted vocabulary of personal values. An extreme existentialist position of radical choice would make no sense precisely because one must there eschew such “traditional” values (as a basis for choosing) and seemingly, therefore, evaluate out of thin air. Evaluation, however, is impossible in such a vacuum. Autonomy does not mean the complete overthrow of the past; it implies, rather, that possible actions are evaluated in light of the values I already accept responsibility for, values that are already determinants for the direction of my life and therefore for the type of person that I am. As Taylor writes, “Moral agency . . . requires some kind of reflexive awareness of the standards one is living by”⁴⁶ (or failing to live by). It is the latter horizon of values that allows further evaluations to be made.

If we now look in more detail at the evaluation procedure, we find, as with the higher emotions, that it is significantly mediated through language, particularly the language of a learned vocabulary of contrasting values. On this question we shall primarily follow Taylor’s analysis.⁴⁷ Taylor’s principal claim is that evaluation is of two fairly distinct types, weak and strong, and that only the latter properly reflects a self-formation of the subject and hence a formation of the type of life the subject leads. Weak evaluation is a judgment that simply considers outcomes and operates on the principle of greater or less desirability. What is lacking here, from the point of view of strong evaluation, is a qualitative judgment concerning the relative worth of such desires. Weak evaluation, in the extreme case, does not enter upon the path of rejecting a desirable alternative because it is, say, base or cowardly; such considerations of worth arise only with a higher or second level reflection:

In weak evaluation, for something to be judged good it is sufficient that it be desired, whereas in strong evaluation there is also a use of “good” or some other evaluative term for which being desired is not sufficient. . . . (Agency, p. 18)

In this way I may set up second-order desires which situate me in the properly human realm of morals and values; only at this point am I significantly different from other animal species (Agency, pp. 15ff).

In our consideration of emotions we noted that whereas lower-level feelings, such as pain and bodily disturbances generally, are simply given (or can be so considered for our purposes), the self-referential emotions are a product of how we articulate or plot a given state of affairs. This same structure, if I follow Taylor correctly, applies to evaluation. The truly ethical realm is not a pregiven stratum of experience, with attendant objective values that it is our job to discern and our duty to follow, but is again tied into our articulation of a given existential situation or proposed action. The situation prompts our evaluation and our evaluation reflects, dialectically, back onto the situation and valorizes it.

Sartre is thus correct in insisting that we create values and that we define ourselves in and through this creative process; that is, as someone who upholds a particular value or set of values. That we so define ourselves is manifest precisely in the responsibility we feel for our decisions (and I am only talking here about authentic choices, not of cases where one blindly follows custom), and also therefore for the guilt we may well experience. Sartre’s account of “bad faith” is again instructive here. Guilt is especially notable for bringing us, via its insistence on being interpreted, to a strong sense of our own being, our own deep-seated values. Guilt, like the inarticulate feelings I earlier discussed, seems to demand a narrative working out of itself.

Such values, or value dispositions, are at once the foundation for my estimations of worth and the habitual basis of myself as a responsible social agent. They are evidenced not only in my acts but also in the stories that I weave to justify such acts. These abiding values are always disclosed to some degree in our present evaluations. This is why our strong evaluations are self-referential (and referential to society) and also self-constitutive. The latter point is important because (a) strong evaluations imply a degree of self-emplotment and (b) many of our evaluations do not simply reflect pregiven dispositions (or expectations) but may go beyond them, perhaps to enhance and deepen them. We may, for example, surprise ourselves in our own estimations and judgments—-just as we may in our stories and dreams. To draw a textual (and hermeneutic) analogy, it is from our fund of knowledge about the world and about language that we are able to constitute and appreciate the intricate plot of a novel. But the novel, in turn, may not leave us as innocent as before we read it. In the end the novel speaks about us.

Present evaluations and judgments are thus founded on our cultural past, both our personal past and the broader historical horizon that delimits the possibilities for our mode of life. We are, as Maclntyre claims, “bearers of tradition,”⁴⁸ and it is what we inherit from this tradition that forms and continues to guide our initial moral perspectives. As social beings we are already caught up in a network of expectations and obligations, and hence of values that we either sustain or attempt to defuse. Such values are embodied in the practices of a society (as they are in the practices of individuals), and are made public and legitimized in the narratives surrounding them. Thus we have the practice of scientific research, ostensibly motivated by the search for truth, and the further story that legitimizes this research by appealing, say, to a pragmatic telos—future benefit to the quality of human life and such like. Here narrative, revealing its kinship with rhetoric, is a medium of justification as well as of persuasion.

Narrative, then, articulates what is of value to us and why, for it essentially defines (in the first instance) who we are and what we want—in cosmologies, eschatologies, histories, etc. It is a moralizing force that embodies and exemplifies the norms (customs) by which people gain identity and that provides criteria of judgment for acts that occur within the society it defines. This social force of narratives (myths, fables, legends, etc.) is perhaps more immediately discernible in “primitive” societies than in our vast and diversified Western culture, though the real reason for this may well be not a lack of narratives but simply our embeddedness in them and the myopia this lack of distance often leads to.

The above analysis of key themes in Taylor’s work sought to show its relevance within the broader framework of a narrative theory of selfhood. In this regard, it is interesting to note that Taylor’s recent book, Sources of the Self, makes this connection far more explicit.⁴⁹ This rich work is at once an account of our present moral situation and a consideration of the notion of selfhood this situation implies. There are, claims Taylor, deep-seated values that operate on an intuitive level in our more important moral evaluations. Such values (e.g., respect for others, freedom, and dignity) can be found to underlie our modern culture, but they require explicit articulation if we are to extricate ourselves from the more superficial and fragmentary world views we consciously operate with and within. Taylor’s work, then, aims at articulating the genesis or history of this modern identity and its associated values.

On the personal level this identity, as in his earlier work, is tied to our sense of what is morally good: “My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose.”⁵⁰ To lack such a framework is, for Taylor, to exist in something approaching a pathological condition. To define myself is thus to become conversant with the values I operate by and am oriented toward in my ongoing actions and choices. Attaining this understanding is necessarily an interpretative or hermeneutic endeavor involving both our situatedness in language and the sense of our lives as an ongoing project or developing story: “we see that the sense of the good has to be woven into my understanding of my life as an unfolding story. But this is to state another basic condition of making sense of ourselves, that we grasp our lives in a narrative.”⁵¹ Only narrative, Taylor maintains, can offer a coherent answer to the persistent questions concerning our identity.

How Taylor’s account of selfhood differs from many traditional theories of the self (from Descartes to Parfit) is precisely in his emphasis on the cardinal importance of moral values to self-identity.⁵² Value’s that have a central significance for persons and how they live their lives must be considered a key factor in the identity of such persons. The crucial role here of narrative is, ideally, to articulate our life as an organic whole (as for Maclntyre) and disclose thereby the various purposes, and hence values, that both guide and define us as engaged human agents. The crisis of our modern identity is thus, for Taylor, intimately linked to both the loss of a unifying framework or grand narrative (rooted in stable, even universal, values and commitments) through which we make sense of our lives and, concomitant with this, the inability to see our lives as an evolving temporal whole and on the model of a quest. It is unclear, however, if in the last resort Taylor allows for the ef fect of a continual interdependence or folding back of narratives onto values.

Charles Taylor and, before him, Alasdair Maclntyre are of course not the only contemporary thinkers in North America who have emphasized the importance of narrative for ethical theory; the work of Stanley Hauerwas is also important in this regard. An insightful paper by Hauerwas and David Burrell poses interesting points concerning the question of narrative versus rationality in ethics.⁵³ The problem they raise concerns the disparagement of narrative understanding (and narrative rationality) in face of a more disengaged and traditional notion of rational appraisal of ethical matters: “contemporary ethical theory has tried to secure for moral judgments an objectivity that would free such judgments from subjective beliefs, wants, and stories of the agents who make them” (HB, p. 16). The model here is the prevalent and influential scientific method of impersonal and instrumental rationality that aims to free practice “from the arbitrary and contingent nature of the agent’s beliefs, dispositions, and character” (HB, p. 16).

In contradistinction to this “scientific” approach, Hauerwas and Burrell make these claims:

(1) that character and moral notions only take on meaning in a narrative; (2) that narrative and explanation stand in an intimate relationship, and, therefore, moral disagreements involve rival histories of explanation; (3) that the standard account of moral objectivity is the obverse of existential ethics, since the latter assumes that the failure to secure moral objectivity implies that all moral judgments must be subjective or arbitrary. (HB, p. 15)

The first point we have already explored to quite a degree. It is a claim that squarely situates morality and moral notions in the ongoing storied life of human agents. It also stresses that moral notions are tied to the character of individuals and to the moral improvement of character. It is not enough to say that one ought to be good, for we also require insight into what the good might be. In other words, we require stories that exemplify the good as put into practice, stories that teach us “to know and do what is right under definite conditions” (HB, p. 16).

The second point gets at the heart of moral disagreements by indicating the important explanatory power of narrative. Another way of putting this is to say, as we mentioned earlier, that narrative legitimizes practice; it is explanatory, but in a way different from a rationality that seeks impersonal grounding principles from which to explain deductively the nature of morality. A narrative position accepts the embeddedness of moral practices in a variety of traditions that in turn support a rich variety of beliefs and dispositions.

The third point is intended to steer a course between objectivism and subjectivism, both being seen as false options. Against objectivism the claim is made that we should turn to the life situations of moral subjects and to their own narrative interpretations of their conduct. Against subjectivism Hauerwas and Burrell contend that this position does not get one into a relativistic individualism:

The fact is that the first person singular is seldom the assertion of the solitary “I”. . . . For our experiences always come in the form of narratives that can be checked against themselves as well as others’ experiences. I cannot make my behavior mean anything I want it to mean, for I have learned from others. The language the agent uses to describe his behavior, to himself and to others, is not uniquely his—it is ours. (HB, p. 21)

Objectivism would separate moral principles from ongoing life or place them in a hypothetical realm preceding the formation of a particular culture (e.g., categorical imperatives and various contractarian approaches), while subjectivism would ignore the sedimented and shared values of the traditions which serve to define our very world view, whether we are conscious of this determination or not.

Hauerwas’s and Burrell’s quarrel with rationalism has much to do with its presupposed freedom from particular practices and times, as though it were a transcendental judge of human affairs. But, they contend, this is not the case: “All our notions are narrative-dependent, including the notion of rationality” (HB, p. 21). Here we are closer to a view of rationality as rhetoric, and therefore as guided by current interests and purposes. In arguing for or against abortion, for example, we usually cannot help but invoke and work out of a narrative context that defines the role of, say, children, procreation, and motherhood in our lives (HB, p. 22).

Our moral notions are intimately tied to such narratives, and we hold such notions because of the value they have for our character and, more generally, “for directing our life-projects and shaping our stories” (HB, p. 22). But narratively embedded moral notions need not, of course, be considered irrational. A good story always has a high degree of rational intelligibility, though it is not the rationality of a scientific exposition that plots linear and necessary connections between phenomena.

Discriminating among stories, say Hauerwas and Burrell, “is less a matter of weighing arguments than of displaying how adopting different stories will lead us to become different sorts of persons” (HB, p. 35). For in the end it is the formation of character (along with its important social dimension) that is crucial in moral considerations. Not “on what principles should we base our actions?” and not simply “how should we behave?” but also “how should we behave in order to become better persons?”—where persons are known only in a historico-narrative context.

Hauerwas and Burrell offer criteria for judging the possible effects of stories, including the “power to release us from destructive alternatives,” “seeing through current distortions,” and “room to keep us from having to resort to violence” (HB, p. 35). Narrative literature (e.g., biblical stories, novels, poetry) clearly serves as an organ for the investigation and representation of various life practices and pursuits, plotting possible outcomes for the characters, along with their associated values. They thereby allow us to experience and judge the value of life-styles and ideologies at a distance, without having to undergo the experience firsthand in our own lives. We learn, for example, tolerance of alternate life-styles. We learn the negative value and workings of deception and deceit. We are exposed to the ideologies that can lead only to mental or physical destruction. In sum, we are exposed, perhaps for the first time, to the whole gamut of human social values, an exposure that tends invariably to develop and sharpen our moral perception and interpretations and serve to give form to our actions in a way that instrumental rationalism either overlooks or grossly understates.

In Paul Ricoeur’s terms, the worlds that are opened up by narratives offer new possibilities to the reading or listening subject; they are worlds that both involve and affect the subject. In the end such experiences may lead to an active refiguration of the subject’s own world and practices, giving them new significance and previously unseen purposes—which is, in effect, to change the character of the subject.⁵⁴

It is a commonplace that our age has often been characterized as lacking a guiding telos, a modern mythology in light of which we can view ourselves, gain identity, and have clearly defined purposes, though science and technology do perform this task to some degree, usurping religion (among other things) in the process. Jean-François Lyotard characterizes our age as not only lacking a “meta-narrative,” a single story uniting human endeavor and aspirations to a single goal, but also as being distrustful of such a thing.⁵⁵ In his praise of multiplicity and segmentation Lyotard goes as far as seeing the virtue of promoting a schizophrenic, divided identity (this is both descriptive and normative for Lyotard).

The power of totalizing ideologies is of course Lyotard’s primary target, but from our point of view the sheer stress on the pervasive influence of narrative is informative. Narratives, and especially meta-narratives, are part of the very fabric of culture and tradition. This phenomenon is clear in small tribal communities where the whole social structure, and the subjects within it, may be guided and regulated by what we call a mythological world view. Once under the sway of such narratives life becomes simply a repetition of the same stages and orders that are there represented, from the broader social structure down to the individual life and its development. In such a world view virtue is tantamount to fulfilling an expected role in society; one performs well or ill what tradition demands, and there may be very little leeway or toleration for deviation.

Narratives are clearly a primary vehicle of ideologies, both nationally and on the level of the individual—the ideologies we inherit and those we fabricate in our conversations with ourselves and others—and they are a powerful force in providing a delimited world where good is good and bad is bad. But we are aware of what happens to many of the values we upheld in earlier days; things quite simply tend toward change. A critical reflection is necessary if our stories, our self-conceptions and possibilities, are not to become confining or stagnant, and if they are to keep in touch with the prenarrative level. Traditions, like individuals, should allow for conflict and variation if they are to remain healthy and not decline.⁵⁶

Narratives, traditionally conceived, seem inherently moralizing. The closure to human actions that they effect is often that of promoting one moral order over another. This is a thesis of Hayden White, one that he finds active in historical texts: “it seems possible to conclude that every historical narrative has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats.”⁵⁷ As such, a narrative is a moral drama that serves in the last resort as an interpretation and judgment of the events related, especially with a view to offering an overview of, while deciding between, conflicting interpretations. A prime example of such conflict is that which guided much of Hegel’s thinking in this area—Sophocles’ Antigone—where we find played out the conflict of divine law versus the king’s law. This situation is similarly reflected in the more prevalent conflict between personal desire and law. Much of our own narrating can usefully be seen as driven by some such conflict, tension, or crisis in our own lives.⁵⁸

It is a commonly accepted view that a stringent and unswerving self-conception is a sign of possible intolerance toward people with a different outlook. One totalizes one’s own position, one’s own account (or belief) of what the good life consists in, and becomes blind to alternatives. This blindness spreads to the understanding of other positions, which are simply discarded rather than understood. This situation especially applies to the dogmatist, who perhaps lacks both imagination and a certain playfulness and has ears only for that which he already believes. Our previous discussion points both to the value and the potential danger of such closure. But closure is often belied by the actual subtext of action (the prenarrative level); a subtext exhibiting divergences and contradictions that are not taken up in the explicit narrative enterprise. Self-understanding rides tandem with an encountering of otherness, with an imaginative empathy for the other that in turn discloses or develops possibilities for oneself. How, indeed, can one understand that which is not a possibility for oneself or that which one has already closed off?

The individual is in fact something of a chameleon, adapting itself very much to the needs of the moment. The structures that support our existence are not static like the frame of a building or automobile. In mankind these structures are especially flexible and adaptive, able to accommodate the new and to give birth to it (the “structuring structures” of Bourdieu). Structure is aimed at performance, at work. In other words, one’s habitus is what gears into the present praxial situation, transforming the world. Viewed in this way, structure alone, and not the superficial exploits of some supposed ego, is a force for creativity. This is, incidentally, why creativity is not easily taught and why it effects its best work passively rather than in accordance with the demands of a thinking-willing subject.

Identity rides on a more or less continuous history of difference, identified and unified more by a route, a history, than by an essence (consider the diverse route of Augustine). The center of my identity is preeminently the present itself and my certainty that I am this present, that it is me (the speaking-thinking subject). Yet in this present I change. I relocate myself or, more precisely, reword myself. I was “there,” now I am “here”. I was “that,” now I am “this.”⁵⁹ Language in this way situates the subject within a chorus of temporal and spatial shifters; language opens a past and a future where the subject is caught in its own signifying practice, sustained by it, produced by it. As Emile Benveniste discovered, “Language is . . . the possibility of subjectivity because it always contains the linguistic forms appropriate to the expression of subjectivity. . . .”⁶⁰ In language (and in expression generally) “I” am set free; but do “I” really speak? With Michel Foucault I maintain that the performing self, the self as origin and originator, is in certain important respects an unnecessary hypothesis.⁶¹ Given what we have so far seen of the self, the question is what role or position does the subject now have, now that it is displaced from center field?

Having shown the relevance of narrative to our lives generally—its role in personal identity, understanding, emotions, values, and cultural identity—we shall now pursue in more detail the question of the individual’s relation to language and to his or her own story. This investigation will yield systematization of the self in terms of a play of semiotic positions—of speaking, spoken, and implied subjects.