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  • Telling Stories
  • Raphael Lyne (bio)
Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories by Gregory Currie. Oxford University Press, 2010. £30. ISBN 9 7801 9928 2609

This is a book aimed principally at philosophers. Its aspiration is to define the characteristics of narratives, and to develop thoughts about why we read narratives and what they might do for us. Perhaps because it is not a book for literary critics or for other enthusiasts of literature it may be all the more important for us to engage with it. This feels at times like a view of literary reading from the outside, but of course it is perilous to imagine an outside of reading: we should all be in it together, one way or another. So the experience of eavesdropping on such a conversation in another discipline, and recognising friction between differing assumptions, is a richly engaging one. Currie's clarity of prose and thought delivers many encouragements and quite a few warnings; at times there are moments of cheering common cause; at times the idiosyncrasy of some aspects of literary critical orthodoxy (inasmuch as that exists) comes into focus; at times apparent idiosyncrasy needs to be defended.

Currie's main objective is to place narrative in the context of a philosophy of communication. The key to understanding what a story is, he argues, is recognising its purpose and its use. Each narrative comes from somewhere (an author) and goes somewhere (a reader, or hearer, or whatever). It carries something (meaning, message, etc.) and it does so for a reason (intention). If any of these elements is opaque, then receivers, experienced in making communications meaningful to themselves, are equipped to infer things, to extract what means something to them (here Currie acknowledges the Relevance Theory of Sperber and Wilson), and to engage in virtual mind-reading as they work out what the creator of the narrative (author or narrator) was trying to achieve.

Narrative was 'made possible by evolved human capacities for communication' (p. 26), and it does something for those capacities. The turn towards evolution is only peripheral to the book, but in a telling appendix to chapter 2, Currie proposes that 'the human capacity for linguistic communication co-evolved with a taste for significantly narrativised accounts of people's behaviour' (p. 47). It is probably scrupulous of him not to expand too much on this, and not to speculate beyond the scope of his [End Page 95] project, but I would have liked to have had this followed through more. Hints about evolution and narrative offer significant bolstering to the 'why' of a book that is carefully devoted to the 'what'.

The 'what' includes some elements of stories about which literary critics have been anxious and often sceptical. Without tackling these concerns in great detail, Currie conducts a robust defence of the author, of the fundamental importance of causation, and of character, all of which he sees as central to the work of narrative, and causing no special philosophical problems. On the author he doesn't present arguments from Barthes or others, but he is surely arguing against the 'death of the author' and its subsequent embedding in the assumptions of a generation or two of literature students. On character, he goes back to L. C. Knights versus A. C. Bradley, but does not really examine the spread of an anti-character orthodoxy in criticism. Here he again raises the issue of evolution, suggesting that we have developed a tendency to believe in Character (i.e. something that links together traits and motivations, rather than 'character', small 'c', that denotes a personage in a narrative). He goes further than this: 'a good deal of our faith in the existence of Character seems to arise, not from our direct experience of persons, but from their literary and dramatic representation' (p. 213). Then he seems to backtrack somewhat from more adventurous implications. The idea of Character might 'retain much or all of its appeal on account of its sturdy usefulness in unifying narratives and its capacity to provide vivid occasions for the playing out of ethical problems' (p. 219).

It is bracing to have a philosopher argue on cool principles what seems...

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