Defending the Middle Ground in Narrative Theory and the Self

I am grateful for the responses from Serife Tekin and James Phillips to my paper (Lumsden 2013), for they allow me to clarify my position. Tekin (2013) accurately characterizes me as attempting to salvage the value of narrative theory without accepting the more stringent demands that have been required or implied, notably the necessity for personhood of a whole life narrative. She notes that I attempt to provide an alternative view of the unity of a person, to the degree that there is that unity, by seeing a self as a bundle of narrative threads. She acknowledges my suggestion that the bundling involves connections at both conscious and unconscious levels. She says we are left with a problem, the ‘adjudication-of-narratives problem’ (AP): if different narrative threads offer different and conflicting narrations of the same episode, how does the person choose, or adjudicate, between them? This process could be a significant one for a psychiatric patient.

I consider the AP to be a very real problem to which I can only offer a few modest thoughts in response. One response is that the position I describe at least has the advantage of avoiding the potential damage to psychiatric patients of presenting them with the unachievable ideal of a whole life narrative, comparable with some physical ideal represented by a model’s Photoshopped photograph in a magazine. That advantage may seem modest, if narrative theory as such is unable to solve the AP. Even so, Tekin does supply the beginning of an answer to the problem. We need to acknowledge the subject’s audience as contributing to the creation of an appropriate narrative, and the adjudication between rival narratives.

One comment of Tekin’s prompts me to introduce a clarification of my position. She says that feature (iii) of narratives, that narratives are incomplete, supports my claim that whole life narratives are not required. That is not an argument I want to rely on, for I consider there could be a narrative that reasonably counts as a whole life narrative despite its being incomplete. That is, it covers the full temporal stretch of a life, and moreover covers all the major activities of that life. Such a broad sweep narrative deserves to be called a ‘whole life narrative,’ even though it is inevitably incomplete, lacking as it does all the details of a life. My position is that even such a broad sweep narrative is not required for personhood. That is in addition to the general point that narratives are inevitably incomplete.

Another clarificatory remark I should make concerns the tightness of connection between subject and experience. Tekin correctly notes that degrees of tightness of connection do not provide the solution to the AP and indeed my talk of tightness of connection is not intended to play such a role. It merely relates to the impossibility of separating the subject from the experience. In my view, a narrative thread could play the role of the subject.

Phillips (2013) occupies a significantly different position from me on narratives and the self. I distinguish between those who think that narratives are continuous with life from those who think they are discontinuous. I belong to the latter group, shown clearly by my allegiance to Feature 3 of narratives. Phillips is in the other camp, along with MacIntyre (1981). They think that life in itself has a narrative structure. The role I see for a narrative is as something internal, which certainly provides shape to a life as lived, but could never characterize the entirety of the life. Phillips’ position comes to the fore when he says:

The notion that a life is complete while a narrative is incomplete is true only if a life is defined as a series of events, or, say, like a glass of water—complete if filled to the top but incomplete if only half full. In contrast, a human life, described as a meaningful narrative unity, could be said to be complete even with millions of irrelevant details left out of the narrative account.

(Phillips 2013, 13)

There is something I can...