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9 s I N G U l A R I T y A N d N A R R AT I v e : c H A R Ac T e R , d I G N I T y, R e c e N T e R I N G The people in whom the system personifies itself [celebrity spokespersons ] are well known for not being what they are; they became great men by stooping below the reality of the smallest individual life, and everyone knows it. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle Whatever kind of poor job I was in my own eyes I was Hari Kumar— and the situation about Hari Kumar was that there was no one anywhere exactly like him. Paul Scott, The Towers of Silence In Reading for the Plot (1984) Peter Brooks reflects on a change in the world’s inexhaustible appetite for stories, a shift not in the appetite but in the stories. In the past, we repeated master plots, overarching Narratives (with an uppercase N). Mythically, we told stories of origin; spiritually, we told stories of fall, redemption, reincarnation, salvation; teleologically, we told stories of purpose, of nature, of ultimate end. For the most part such Narratives disappeared after the Renaissance, Brooks observes. Since then, history has replaced theology as the authoritative narrative, and we now tend to speak of personal identity in terms of the remembered past, and of social purpose in terms of a projected earthly future. Paradoxically, since the demise of Narratives we use narratives (lowercase n) with a new urgency, “as the key discourse and central imagination” to order, organize, and explain a secular world (5-6). Serious scholars have shown their own inexhaustible appetite for stories, especially in the last half-century. It seems the scholarship of every major professional field has taken a “narrative turn”: anthropology , organizational studies, literary criticism, legal studies, cognitive science, discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, journalism, historiography itself—you name it. On the member/society and singular/collective 132 AU T H ORI N G scales, in many fields that turn has weighed ponderously on the social and collective end of the beam. Narrative is analyzed as a cognitive frame, discursive paradigm, or behavioral guideline assigned by society , culture, or ideology, and received by subjects in order to make sense of their lives. Fairy tales conform to thirty-one universal plot features , history follows narrative tropes as few as four in number, children shape their moral behavior to fit family tales, juries are unconsciously persuaded by cultural story lines hidden in attorney’s questions and summaries, the most ordinary public acts such as walking into a restaurant enact pre-coded social scripts, discursive genres both fictional and non-fictional obey or deliberately transgress (and acknowledge by transgressing) traditional plot lines. Supposedly, the influence of pre-written narrative enters deep into each of us. What we may believe is our own private story of our own life-course, not told fully to anyone else, still borrows its plots from elsewhere. Developmentalists Jan-Erik Ruth and Gary Kenyon summarize the theory: “Life stories reflect standard mythical scenarios in a culture drawn from literature, drama, and sacred heroes of the past, as well as present media heroes from TV and film” (1996, 5). Supposedly, even the “self ” to which we feel our life-history is happening constructs itself from stories told by the world outside of us. According to James M. Day and Mark B. Tappan—pursuing their exploration of storytelling , human development, and moral action, the self is “an inhabited, decentered actor, in a theatrical world of possible stories where all action is rehearsed, justified, and reviewed according to the narrative possibilities inherent in the actual context(s) in which action occurs” (1996, 71).1 In this and following chapters we will tread a narrow line. On the one hand, we want to affirm the value of providential narratives; their virtue of explaining events, choices, desires, and lives over time; their distinct way of capturing subtlety, healing trauma, sharing wisdom, expressing social identity. On the other hand, we want to believe that in life or in writing the fact of human singularity alters the way people 1. The radical position on narrative and social construction can be uncompromising: “There is no selfhood apart from the collaborative practice of its figuration” (Battaglia 1995, 2); “The self is social in its entirety” (Burkitt 1992, 215). The next chapter, however , will present some current scholars of life-history, such as...

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