Prophets, Gurus, and Pundits: Rhetorical Styles and Public Engagement

6. Narrator Style: Christiane Amanpour

105 6 narrator stYle: Christiane aManPour In Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, the protagonist, Celie, serves also as narrator. As a rhetorical device, Celie-the-narrator tells Celie-the-character ’s story in a way that gives readers a sense of history, of place, of politics, of society, of relational dynamics, of the struggles of power. Celie -the-narrator represents faceless and voiceless other Celies in the world. She is the book’s conscience, its rudder, and its soul. When director Steven Spielberg made his version of The Color Purple into a film, he maintained Celie-the-character but removed Celie-the-narrator. In turn, Spielberg’s film stifles “Celie’s dialogue with God and herself, [obscuring] her story of self-empowerment through relationship and community” and diminishes Celie to the role of distant onlooker (Lister, 2010, p. 24). Ultimately rendering a feminist narrative a foil for normative patriarchal structures, “Spielberg’s film recasts Celie’s story to fit cultural myths, rather than highlighting her alternate path to power in its racial and sexual specificity ” (in Lister, 2010, p. 24). Celie is robbed, literally, of her voice. The role of the Narrator, in general, is to convey a story and, along with the author and audience, is one of the three principal voices in storytelling . Unlike the author and audience, though, The narrator is known as the viewpoint character, the voice that gives the audience the lens through which they will view the narrative, the frame for understanding the characters, the plot, the moral, and the context of the story. Good narrators do not merely report but translate, instruct, and constitute a community. The Narrator style melds experience, experts, and audience, taking us on a story with an ever-changing backdrop and cast, connecting stories with real people and real communities via a savvy media approach. As James Jasinski (2001) explains, narrative can have an instrumental or 106 nArrAtor style constitutive function. Narrative functions instrumentally when it is “used to respond to exigencies in a rhetorical situation and manifest direct or indirect arguments or persuasive appeals” (p. 393). Narrative functions constitutively when it helps “to shape and transform how a community understands its world, and when they offer inducements to create, recreate or transform the social world” (Jasinski, 2001, p. 393). The Narrator, then, frames identity and subjectivity, time and temporality, community and political culture, and language (Jasinski, 2001, p. 399). In communication theorist Walter Fisher’s work on narrative, he quotes Alasdair MacIntyre, who argues, “Man [sic] is in his actions and practices, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal” (1984, p. 1). In other words, narration is not a “fictive composition” but a “theory of symbolic action—words and/or deeds—that have sequence or meaning for those who live, create, or interpret them” (Fisher, 1984, p. 2). In laying out his narrative paradigm, Fisher joins the argumentative with the aesthetic , revealing the public sphere as a place where stories, rather than formal or informal logic, move citizens to action. Narrative is particularly persuasive because it is connective and relational—it binds people, histories , regions, and themes. Rabbi Michael Goldberg explains, Neither “the facts” nor our “experiences” come to use in discrete packets disconnected which simply await the appropriate moral principle to be applied. Rather, they stand in need of some narrative which can bind the facts of our experience together into a coherent pattern and is thus in virtue of that narrative that our abstracted rules, principles, and notions gain their full intelligibility. (qtd. in Fisher, 1984, p. 3) In Fisher’s terms, narratives serve to recount and account for an event or situation. Recounting can be history or biography; accounting involves theory and argument (Fisher, 1984). The Narrator, then, is the person that “relates a truth about the human condition” through narration (Fisher, 1984, p. 6). Two other entailments of Fisher’s narrative paradigm seem particularly germane. First, stories resonate with human beings on a visceral level because the stories are value laden. In Narrator public intellectuals, we are prudent to discern patterns among competing values that permeate their rhetoric and actions. In the tradition of wise women (see Steiner-Adair, 1988) and in more recent work on women’s political rhetoric (see Campbell , 1989; Dow & Tonn, 1993), values like nurturance and care consistently nArrAtor style 107 mark women’s rhetorical and behavioral choices. In turn, we would expect different...