Narrative after Deconstruction

Chapter One The Narrative Turn

1 Deconstruction and Narrative In the last decade literary and cultural critics have increasingly turned toward the language of narrative and storytelling to describe the act of assigning meaning to some object or textual feature. Hayden White’s once-controversial claim that historiography is a form of narration that is as much concerned with formal closure and generic expectations (expectations of “cohesion”) as it is with its “correspondence” to historical fact (Tropics 66) has now been extended to many other fields. It has become commonplace to see the analysis of literature as relying on literary histories that are always constructions with their own tendency to create entities such as “American Literature” for their own strategic purposes (McHale, Constructing 1). In contrast to White’s early assumption that the hard sciences are the antithesis of narration (Tropics 30), Donna J. Haraway has mounted a feminist critique of the biological sciences by revealing the operation of “fictive strategies” and “allowable stories” within primatology (85). Perhaps more thoroughly than any of these, postcolonial criticism has associated “nations” and “narration”—claiming that the “social” is entwined with the narratives that members of a society tell about themselves—in its attempt to reveal imperialism and its alternatives in diverse cultural products (Bhabha, Nation). In these instances, narrative is equated with the production of historical, literary, cultural, and even scientific knowledge. Narrative seems to appeal to critics today as an alternative to deconstructive language of textual deferral, slippage, and indeterminacy. Indeed, to refer to narrative as a “turn” from deconstruction is itself an ironic echo of the revolution that deconstruction brought to historical and literary studies two decades ago. An endless spate of books and articles trumpeted the “linguistic turn” that deconstruction was supchapter one THE NARRATIVE TURN . posed to have introduced into the humanities—a turn that included narrative , ironically, as one form of the deconstructive interest in language .1 We cannot understand what critics mean when they appeal to narrative in contemporary criticism without recognizing narrative’s ambiguous relationship to deconstruction. Although some have suggested that narrative may be part of our basic phenomenological perception of the world (Kerby), in contemporary criticism narrative usually describes knowledge organized through language. Deconstruction has provided the most elaborate theory of how language influences understanding, but critics have seen the infinite textual unraveling of différance as a dead end incapable of justifying the need to write and to deconstruct. Like deconstructionists, critics who describe knowledge as a “narrative” are suspicious of claims to objectivity. As Christopher Norris notes, the popularity of describing knowledge as a narrative construction “mostly goes along with a marked reaction against the kinds of wholesale explanatory theory which would seek to transcend their own special context or localized conditions of cultural production” (Contest 21). Narrative, however, is a much less threatening model for language’s influence on knowledge than the deconstructionist idea that “there is nothing outside of the text.” A narrative, after all, usually has a narrator who can take responsibility for the narratives he or she constructs . While describing oneself as a “narrator” admits that one’s conclusions are interested, by confessing this bias a writer can indirectly increase the ethical force of his or her claims. This paradoxical claim to legitimacy at work within contemporary criticism is noted well by John McGowan in his critique of Edward W. Said. In turning to the deconstructionist language of “otherness” Said returns to a traditional humanism , according to McGowan. We have not recognized, McGowan claims, how parasitic the whole concept of an other is on liberal traditions of individualism . To put it another way, to imagine the other as distant and separate is profoundly undialectical. The poststructuralist skepticism about claims made for and about the existence of otherness stems from an acute awareness that the other participates in a relationship that defines him as other. The very notion that otherness affords some kind of purity or freedom rests on an assumption of self-sufficiency, of an identity forged in the absence of social ties. (175) This valorization of otherness helps to produce an image of the critic as capable of recognizing and admitting one’s own bias; the result, according to McGowan, is a contradictory image of the contemporary intellectual as free precisely by virtue of admitting one’s place within poststructuralist representational and metaphysical systems. McGow2 . Narrative after Deconstruction an writes, “Said, like much of the left, wants to maintain...