I just don't want us to take the dichotomy too seriously beyond
its rhetorical purpose. There are a _lot_ of modes of human
verbal (and more-than-verbal) meaning-making, and while narrative
certainly must have its due, I think it dangerous to elevate it
to some theoretical primacy. It also seems unwise to me to define
it so broadly that one ignores the wide variety of very different
discourse forms that could march under its banner, or in a
procrustean way to try to reframe too much of the discourse
universe as some variety of narrative.
There is certainly no neglect of narrative in the contemporary
school curriculum, whether interpretive or constructive, while
there is a serious lack of attention to non-narrative genres _as_
social and linguistic forms. Our society pays few people a living
for writing narratives, and generates enormous profits from
inculcating the habit of consuming narratives. It pays quite a
bit on the other hand to master-writers of many other genres,
whom it trains in very small numbers, and it uses these other
forms of writing as the keys to operating its many levers of
power.
There is, I'm afraid, a certain romanticism of middle-class
luxury in being able to afford devoting a large portion of one's
attention to matters of well-wrought story and narratively
mediated inquiries into the niceties of personal identities and
relationships. Mass-consumption narratives dispense even with
these (except for those specifically aimed at women, it seems)
and just tell stories of action that lack all critical framing.
This is not to say that some narratives do not achieve great
critical insights, but just as science and philosophy hide their
connections to narrative, such narratives may be hiding the
analytical sources of their own higher critical achievements.
Narrative is important and must be given its due in every sort of
general analysis of activity and culture, but an excessive
emphasis on narrative is, for me, quite bluntly, politically
suspect.
JAY.
PS. I hope it's understood that I'm not trying to indict
anybody's conscious political motives; I'm just making an
abstract analytical point that could apply to myself as well as
to anyone else. People writing to this list generally strike me
as being about as politically progressive as I could ask for, and
I would not have made the point I did otherwise.
-----------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU