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N ARRATIVE C ONSCIOUSNESS AND
H ISTORICAL E XPERIENCE: L IVING L INKS
“Where should we look for an account of […] experience? Not to ledger-entries nor yet to a treatise on economics or sociology or personnel-psychology, but to drama or fiction. It’s nature and import can be expressed only by art, because there is a unity of experience that can be expressed only as an experience. The experience of material fraught with suspense and mov-ing toward its own consummation through a connected series of varied inci-dents.
John Dewey, Art as Experience
Int roduc tio n
IN THIS CHAPTER I WILL EXAMINE a point key to my overall argument: The foundational, sustentive and deeply promotive narrative framework that conditions human consciousness and lived historical experience. We will probe deeper into the elements and functions of this “nutritive system” common to historiography and his-torical novels, showing how hishis-torical texts emerge from, are continuous with, are
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incorporated within, and have a similar structure to narrative consciousness function-ing in the aesthetics ethic. In certain important respects we will find that, as Jürgen Straub has written:
Narrative psychology and history share an interest in knowing the ways hu-man beings make sense of this huhu-man world and choose to act in it. […] Histo-rians’ concerns are twofold: (1) reporting and comprehending the specific un-derstandings and actions of people that have been undertaken in the past, and (2) knowing the manner in which people produce this comprehension of past ac-tions and events. Narrative psychologists and many historians hold that the nar-rativation is a basic process by which people of the past comprehended and acted in the world and people of the present comprehend and act. Because of this mutual interest in narrativation, the scholarship and insights of narrative psychologists and historians are of reciprocal interest to each. (17)82
Going forward we may equate Straub’s “narrative psychology” with “narrative consciousness”—my theme throughout this chapter. That human consciousness is broadly, encompassingly narrative is now posited by a number of researchers of hu-man consciousness (as well as experts in other disciplines), and so we will be pro-vided with a wealth of very specific and empirical evidence illustrating this point. In the following I will first sponsor a dialog that juxtaposes the interacting beliefs of his-torical theorists and historians about their craft. I will then review a dash of similarly fashioned literary theory, which we by now know can be aptly applied not only to his-torical novelization, but also to historiography.83 After this study, I will look into re-search into human consciousness and psychology, which will bring home the fact that human consciousness is narratively ordered. We will be viewing the origins of deep
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narrative structures, a given “narrative substance,” and see the life-blood connections that reveal their significance and place in the very essence (I use the word advisedly, trust me) of what we are, and the ways we inscribe these narrative emoluments into historical writing. Our existence is a narrative existence, and we must view the his-torical texts (actual and virtual) that emerge from and reflect this existence in this light. Finally, I will round out the analysis with a brief study I call “The Importance of Thought, Redux,” which will add philosophical details to the examination of the nar-rative structure of human consciousness. With these ideas in mind, I will attempt to show the veritable depth of narrative in human existence, and the ways it imbues and conditions virtually every corner of historical life and historical narrative. This scious narrative, by now probably needless to say, is by definition an aesthetic con-struct and thus connects into the aesthetics ethic I have described. In the final analy-sis, we shall see how narrative constituents and aesthetics are the basis of human conscious output, which by definition conditions historically mediated fields of com-municative action and endeavor, bolstering individual and community sentience in manifold ways, and transacting with a range of other actors and narratives. Without meaning to overstate, I believe that the connections I will examine will show some-thing of a high road to historical apprehension in historical narrative. My argument might seem circular to some: the shapes of the past (human experience) are created as virtual molds of narrative human consciousness, such that the past is first narrative.
These shapes are apprehended and interpreted by human beings (writers and their audiences, themselves involved in ongoing narrative processes), and in this process then are made narrative again in historical writing. The original, primordial narrative of human experience and history is newly narrativized in historical writing, with the epistemology, aesthetics and ethics of first the fundaments and then the produced
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works very much in accord. We could say that narrative is best able to appropriate, index and convey history because it is the methodology imbued in and employed by humans to appropriate, index and convey their history, as they live it. Not one without the other, as it were. And so in sum, yes, this might all seem a bit circular, but that does not dissuade me. With this said, let us wade into some rather deep theoretical waters, and examine all that has been proposed here.
Histo rical T heory a nd Na rra tive Co nscio us ness
THAT NARRATIVE IS THE ESSENCE, the form and fettle, of historical writing has been indicated by many writers and researchers in this area for many years. We saw in chapter 2 how Louis Menand “certainly” describes himself as a narrative histo-rian, and historian Jonathan D. Spence, Sterling Professor of History, emeritus, Yale University, writes that “I do believe certain historical events have a strong narrative line that links them, and that as an author you might be able to use that to enrich your own writing and draw in the reader” (personal correspondence with author, 3 August 2009). At an even higher level, Thomas Bender of New York University notes a growing “recognition that national histories are embedded in yet larger histories”
which in turn yields the sense of “a wider canvas,” providing a moment “especially propitious” for “yet more ambitious strategies of narrative synthesis” in historical writing (para. 82, 79, 81, 82). For James M. McPherson, such a “canvas” impelled him to choose “a narrative framework for my story” in his Battle Cry of Freedom, al-lowing him to best capture the “successive crises, rapid changes, dramatic events, and dynamic transformations” in the U.S. during the Civil War (both ix). Such actions,
“woven” together by McPherson (Battle Cry of Freedom x), occurred “in several
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spheres” that “impinged on each other” “almost simultaneously” (Battle Cry of Free-dom ix). McPherson’s description evinces overall narrative structure, as well as deep contingency in narrative, which I will examine in chapter 4 of this work.
The above views introduce my own ideas, but my aim is to probe beneath the higher level described here and show how historical theory has often tapped into ele-ments of human consciousness as basal attributes and influential conditions. For Dan-iel Wickberg, whose ideas are so important to my analysis, histories of sensibilities are not higher-level structurations, but manifold “patterns of perception, feeling, thinking” (684), and “specifically affective elements of consciousness” (671). These
“granules” of experience and conscious apprehension are “in history rather than out-side it” (Wickberg 669; “granules” by this author). Jörn Rüsen, Preout-sident of the Insti-tute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at Essen, Germany, adds that:
Narratives transform the past into history; they combine experience and ex-pectation—the two main time dimensions in human life. As a synthesis of experi-ence and expectation it includes a relationship to the human subject as well—its identity as a coherence of the self in the changes of time. Narratives create the field where history lives its cultural life in the minds of the people, telling them who they are and what the temporal change of themselves and their world is about. (History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation 2)
A similar description comes from Karsten R. Stueber:
A good historical narrative in its detailed account of an individual’s circum-stances—biographical, cultural, and otherwise—enables us not only to see the thoughts of an individual as a possible reason for action, but it allows us to
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stand them—with as much certainty as possible in the practical realm—as the reason for a person’s action. It permits us to understand how agents arrived at be-ing committed to certain values and certain rules and how they became interested in striving for certain things in life. (43)84
Historical theorist J.H. Hexter wrote in The History Primer that historical writers must continually “consider the common mind and intermittently but inescapably the other face” (220). Perhaps this seems obvious, but it is no less than vital to the histori-cal writer’s craft for more than one reason. To refrain from “telling what it was like to envision the world” as historical figures did (Hexter The History Primer 212) would, first, “be counterproductive of knowledge, understanding, and truth,” and would
“render the flow of historical discourse sterile, narrow, and shallow” (Hexter The His-tory Primer both 217). As well, these suppositions extend to the communal and apply
“equally to past human communities and collectivities” (Hexter The History Primer 219). In a metamorphosing and contracting world, “understanding what it is like to be another […] has become increasingly essential in the larger context of a society that more and more throws [people] into contact with people far different from them-selves” (Hexter The History Primer 215). Such focus on the lived experience of indi-viduals and communities has moral outcomes, is necessary to “do justice” to history and historical actors (Hexter The History Primer 215), and cultivates “a certain habit of mind, a set of intellectual reflexes, that enhance [humans’] readiness to consider and try to understand now in the present what it is like to be another” (Hexter The History Primer 220). I will pick up contours of Hexter’s main idea just below when I am examining literary theory in light of our arguments.85
To continue, M.C. Lemon writes that “the perceiving and constructing of intel-ligible sequences of occurrences [narratives] is a universal, instinctive human
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teristic” (67). Peter Munz, meanwhile, writes that the “salient features” of history “are those put into it by its participants’ and by historians’ consciousness” (226), that “the historian’s activity is a continuation of the potential self-reflective activity of [histori-cal] actors” (341), and that “consciousness and reflection are necessary if time is to be transformed in history” (343). Frank Ankersmit and Paul Ricoeur, finally, tell us that
“interpretive narrativism has already invaded our daily reality” (Ankersmit, “Six The-ses” 245), and “the self, narratively interpreted, is itself a figured self—a self which figures itself as this or that” (Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity” 80).
From the above, Rüsen’s accounts of “experience and expectation,” “the hu-man subject,” “the minds of the people” and “coherence of the self”; Stueber’s de-scriptions of the “detailed account of an individual’s circumstances,” his or her
“thoughts,” “certain values and certain rules,” and the “reasons for a person’s action”;
Hexter’s consideration of “the common mind…the other face” and “human communi-ties and collectivicommuni-ties”; Lemon’s “instinctive human characteristic”; Gallie’s “ground of intelligibility”; Munz’s talk of consciousness and conscious reflection; Ankersmit’s straightforward reflection on “daily reality” and Ricoeur’s on “figuring out” one’s self; and recall Lawrence Stone’s comment that historical writers need “to discover what was going on inside people’s heads in the past”—all of this I believe can be in-terpreted as referring to varying constituents of individual and collective human con-sciousness, and from there, by definition, conscious historical action and outcomes (one such outcome which is historical writing). Indeed, following these lines of thought, historical researchers and writers apprehend that historical narratives are a recognizable aesthetic outcome of historically mediated human consciousness—but this is the easy part. In addition, they also recognize that these narratives have much more important meaning and import than may be commonly recognized, with
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losophical and moral/ethical meaning and significance seeping in. David Harlan, pro-fessor of history, California State University San Luis Obispo, has written that when we have recognized that as we are effecting apprehension in our historical narratives, establishing connections with the past and “populating our own imaginaries with peo-ple and ideas that can help us say: ‘This is how we mean to live, but do not yet live,’”
we create a densely cerebral and conscious process of appropriation by way of which we can examine our historical lives and “cure life into meaning,” (qtd. in Jenkins, Why History? 188-189).
We will see similar vocabulary and conceptions in our look at literary theory and consciousness research. We will apprehend that these ideas are linked along a continuum and see that all of these thinkers and writers are essentially performing connected intellectual and theoretical activity located in one domain. As German his-torian Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884) wrote, “History is the ‘Know Thyself’ of humanity—the self-consciousness of mankind.” From such self-consciousness, “all the rest follows” (qtd. in Frederick Jackson Turner 201).
Lit era ry Analysis a nd Na rra tive Co nscio us ness
NOW LET’S TRAVEL A BIT FARTHER afield, and see how the works of a vari-ety of literary and cultural analysts, with their far-reaching focus on the analysis of narrative, also posit worlds and frameworks as I have been describing. In a way not dissimilar to historical theorists, it seems to me that although many cultural and liter-ary theorists in recent years have claimed to be ripping holes in once-unified grand narratives and shedding light into what they felt were weirdly penumbral pools of human existence and communication, they have in fact often simply been tapping into known elements and functions of human consciousness—as grand and
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tion-resistant a narrative as you could ask for (though admittedly peppered with its own brands of différance and deferral, and not a few shadowy aporias; I will examine this conception below).
To introduce our ideas, consider very briefly the words of Frank Kermode, who in The Sense of an Ending, beautifully combined the role of narrative construc-tion within an amalgam of human experience and consciousness, with its ever-important aim of constructing value in life:
For to make sense of our lives from where we are, as it were, stranded in the middle, we need fictions of beginnings and fictions of ends, fictions which unite beginning and end and endow the interval between them with meaning. (190)
Scholes and Kellogg similarly focused on meaning in narrative and life in The Nature of Narrative, writing that “Meaning, in a work of narrative art, is a function of the re-lationship between two worlds: the fictional world created by the author and the ‘real’
world, the apprehendable universe” (82; following quotes from Scholes and Kellogg).
This connection was either representational (in our study, historiography) or illustra-tive (fictional, “stylized and stipulaillustra-tive, highly dependent on artistic tradition and convention” [84]). In the following analyses I will be attempting something like a blend of these two methodologies across the real and the imagined, seeking the “intri-cate process of oscillation between these two ways of creating a simulacrum of the real world” (89). Scholes and Kellogg spend much time linking meaning to depth of character and associated points of view (of characters and the narrator in text, the author, and the reading audience).86 Writers (both factual/empirical and fic-tional/imaginative), in the first place, are after “the inward life of the characters”
(171), points of view and “the character’s thoughts” (193). The end results are
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tives that “impinge[] on our consciousness as a totality” (275), with experience or-dered into “perceptive data in our consciousness” (275), becoming “a method which dissolves reality into multiple and multivalent reflections of consciousness,” as Erich Auerbach, quoted by Scholes and Kellogg, wrote (203).
The work of Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) is also helpful. Jakobson’s “re-marks about poetics in its relation to linguistics” (“Linguistics and Poetics” 258),
“questions of relations between the word and the world” (“Linguistics and Poetics”
1258), and his examination of points of view, models of addresser/channel/addressee and associated codings and contexts that at the highest level becomes a veritable
“pan-semiotics” (“Linguistics and Poetics” 1258) stretching across communicative action, seem to approximate ideas in the aesthetics ethic, and to be sure draw on psy-chological and even scientific interpretations that extend outside the realm of a strictly literary (or even strictly aesthetic) analysis.87
Another Russian literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin forecasted key elements in the areas I am examining in his famed Discourse and the Novel. His conceptions of dialogism and diverse narrative voices (heteroglossia) that lie “on the borderline be-tween one-self and the other” (293) and that “Understanding and response are dialec-tically merged and mutually condition each other” (282), creating a platform for “spe-cific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values”
(291-292), could veritably be referring to the functions and roles that human con-scious experience plays in community and communication, by way of self and subjec-tivity, intersubjecsubjec-tivity, conscious conceptualization, point of view, and meaning and value (I say “veritably” but in fact in Discourse in the Novel Bakhtin often directly addresses the ways that parameters of conscious intentionality are incorporated into
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and condition novelization). Bakhtin in this work composes a list of combinatory “ba-sic types of compositional-stylistic unities” that integrate and administer novelistic narrative synthesized into a “higher unity of the work as a whole” (both 262), and fur-ther unites elements of consciousness and communication. Bakhtin’s types include:
• Direct authorial intervention
• Oral everyday narration
• Written everyday narration
• Additional “extra-artistic authorial speech (moral, philosophical or scientific state-ments, oratory, ethnographic descriptions, memoranda, etc.)”
• Individualized speech of characters88
In terms of the relationships we are discussing, Bakhtin’s factors can be linked to hu-man conscious processes by way of: 1) the influence of the author’s control of con-scious experience expressed in historical writing; 2) the roles of oral and written lan-guage in novelistic discourse, which are linguistic productions which play a central role in human conscious/communicative experience; and 3) incorporation of varied characters’ points of view and perspectives, which play important roles in both expe-rience and narration, and are encapsulated in a) first person expeexpe-rience, statement and personal reflection, and b) third person report and intersubjective conditions. Note how Bakhtin’s narrative ideas of individual conscious control and linguistic manipu-lation of narrative communicative action align with phenomena “associated with the notion of consciousness” as described by consciousness researcher and theorist David Chalmers in his “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness.” These phenomena in-clude conceptions such as “the reportability of mental states,” “the ability to discrimi-nate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli,” and “the integration of
In terms of the relationships we are discussing, Bakhtin’s factors can be linked to hu-man conscious processes by way of: 1) the influence of the author’s control of con-scious experience expressed in historical writing; 2) the roles of oral and written lan-guage in novelistic discourse, which are linguistic productions which play a central role in human conscious/communicative experience; and 3) incorporation of varied characters’ points of view and perspectives, which play important roles in both expe-rience and narration, and are encapsulated in a) first person expeexpe-rience, statement and personal reflection, and b) third person report and intersubjective conditions. Note how Bakhtin’s narrative ideas of individual conscious control and linguistic manipu-lation of narrative communicative action align with phenomena “associated with the notion of consciousness” as described by consciousness researcher and theorist David Chalmers in his “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness.” These phenomena in-clude conceptions such as “the reportability of mental states,” “the ability to discrimi-nate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli,” and “the integration of