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Concrescence:

The Australasian Journal of Process Thought


Concrescence 2002 Vol.3 pp.1-12 ISSN 1445-4297 AJPT, 2002
Published on-line by the Australasian Association of Process Thought, a member of the International Process Network

What is Narrative?
Ricoeur, Bakhtin, and Process Approaches
Jenny Rankin
Philosophy and Cultural Inquiry, Swinburne University,
P.O. Box 218, Hawthorn, Vic., 3122 Australia

Abstract Centuries of indifference to narrative have, according to some insightful writers, culminated in a
breakdown or crisis in narrative, characterised by a reduced significance of literary works and by a fragmented
temporal organisation of peoples lives. Yet in the twentieth century new academic interest in narrative emerged,
particularly through the works of Paul Ricoeur, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Building on their works
we may now posit narrative as a triad of the narrative work or artefact, the narrative mode of consciousness, and the
relation between these two, characterised as communication. This re-conceptualisation reveals the ongoing,
unfolding, temporal, and creative, or in other words, the processual nature of narrative. It also allows us to see that
narrative is fundamental to other human processes, such as those of dialogue, intentionality, consciousness,
knowledge, culture, community, reality construction, and, ultimately, personal identity. Narrative can now be
regarded as primordial to all human affairs and the source of what MacIntyre terms the unity of a life.

Keywords Narrative, consciousness, communication, Ricoeur, MacIntyre, Bakhtin, process

Over the last few centuries narrative has been slowly
emerging from the mists of philosophical denigration
and neglect to reveal itself as a process primordial to
human affairs. Narrative is gradually coming to be
comprehended as the ground in which, the relations
through which and the vehicle by which humans
develop knowledge of themselves and the world they
inhabit. It can now be seen that human agency,
intentionality, actions, perceptions, and experiences
are conceived, understood and mediated by cultural
and personal narratives, and that the struggle for
recognition is played out between humans in the
narrative field. Through a process of ongoing
creation and recreation, a continual dialectical
movement between memory and anticipation, and the
relations between humans that it facilitates, narrative
brings forth the human processes of knowledge,
culture, tradition, truth, reality, consciousness and
identity.
Unlike time which has always preoccupied
philosophers with its thorough pervasiveness,
ubiquity, and paradoxical universality (Wood, 1991)
narrative has not so much perplexed philosophers
through the ages as it has been almost routinely
denigrated and neglected (Gare, 2002). This is a
curious state of affairs, since it is only through
narrative that we comprehend and express time and,
indeed, all thought. Nevertheless, narrative has often
and for long periods been dismissed as a realm of
mere fiction or entertainment, as a representation or
imitation of reality, and as an artefact arising from an
otherwise idle human consciousness rather than
constitutive of consciousness itself. It has been, and
in many spheres is still subordinated variously and
often concurrently to reason, to mathematics and
philosophy, to objects and forms, to the real and the
eternal, to instrumental rationality and to science. In
short, narrative has been unwittingly relegated to the
role of describing being rather than to creating,
expressing and unfolding the possibilities of
becoming.
This is not to say that narrative has gone out of
existence. Rather it is to say that the central role of
the process of narrative to other human processes of
thought, knowledge and reality, consciousness and
identity, has been largely unrecognised or denied, and
that both narrative and the other human processes it
brings forth are impoverished by such denial. This
denial has prompted some to speak of a crisis in
literary novels, in the arts generally, and to a
breakdown in the temporal organisation of peoples
lives a crisis otherwise known as the postmodern
condition. Yet from this crisis has arisen a renewed
interest in narrative, in the form of semiotics,
linguistics, and narratology a seemingly belated
study of what many perceive we are losing. This
renewed interest has largely confined itself to a
systematic study of cultural artefacts to stories as
works, products, or texts. However, from this
renewed interest several theorists have emerged who
seem to be moving towards a process view of
narrative.
One of the most prominent theorists to arise from this
new interest is Paul Ricoeur, whose three-volume
work Time and Narrative (1994-5) has received
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world-wide acclaim. He has given us what is
regarded as the most complete characterisation of
narrative to date. It is a characterisation that sees
narrative as the basic structure of our experience of
time, and that posits a three-stage process of mimesis,
from which stems narrative identity and all human
creativity. With the presentation of these ideas
Ricoeur sets a program for others to follow. Yet
Ricoeurs ideas are not without problems, and three of
these problems will be examined here, especially in
regard to the work of David Carr, Mikhail Bakhtin
and Alasdair MacIntyre. While none of these
problems is insoluble, still they point to a need to re-
think and re-work Ricoeurs three-stage mimesis, and
his idea of narrative identity, taking into account the
processual nature of narrative and its intimate and
inextricable links to other human processes of
identity, knowledge, consciousness and reality.
To illustrate the processual nature of narrative I would
like at this point to propose a three-way approach to
the question: What is a narrative? The first is to
consider narrative as a cultural artefact, a work or text
or product that can take many forms but which has the
ultimate purpose of telling or unfolding a story. The
second approach is to consider narrative as the
fundamental mode of human consciousness and self-
consciousness. The third approach is to consider the
relation between narrative as product and narrative as
mode of consciousness. This relation may be
characterised as communicative, and as such is the
ultimate purpose of language and narrative. Each of
these three aspects of narrative is dependent on the
other; no one of them could exist without the other
two, yet of the three, narrative relation is the most
important. From this relation it can be posited that
narrative is an ongoing temporal process from which
can emerge other processes, of dialogue,
intentionality, consciousness of the world and of
other, conceptions of temporality beyond that of lived
experience, and ultimately personal identity.

I. NARRATIVE AS STORY OR PRODUCT
Generally and perhaps intuitively we know what
narrative is: A story factual, fictitious, or
somewhere between the two that is usually told
verbally or in writing, but may be expressed in other
symbolic systems, such as those of art, of sign
language, or of gesture. We may conceptualise a
narrative work as any form of telling, where a telling
involves a teller or narrator, an audience, and a
subject. The subject concerns the arrangement of
elements actions, events, characters, experiences,
and situations into an unfolding temporal
configuration that makes sense of or gives meaning to
these elements. This unfolding is a temporal ordering
but is not necessarily represented in the strict
chronological order in which the events actions or
experiences actually occurred. As Patrick ONeill
(1996) comments, narrative is a purely discursive
system of presentation[and in this sense all
narrative]is in principle fictional to begin with. (p.
15). A story is defined, almost unanimously, as a
synthesising of heterogeneous elements; a synthesis in
which a beginning, middle, and end are construed,
where each element and each stage contribute to the
whole, and where each are resolved to produce
closure. To this extent, it might be argued, all
telling has some degree of the fictional about it, since
it brings together parts (events, characters, actions,
situations or circumstances) that seem otherwise
unrelated, into a comprehensible unity or whole that
did not have prior existence. To the extent that
scientific explanations, histories, or critiques are
syntheses of unrelated parts they all stories and all
contain a degree of the fictional.
Most theorists, including Paul Ricoeur and Shlomith
Rimmon-Kenan, treat the words narrative and
story as synonymous. Thomas Leitch (1986),
however, makes a distinction between story and
narrative, referring to the closure, the framework or
structure of story as its promise. A story, he
suggests, may be judged good or poor according to
how well it fulfils its promise. For Leitch story is but
one form of narrative he intimates that some
narratives no longer constitute story when removed
from their original context, that some narratives are
potential stories waiting to be fleshed out, and that
some are never stories because they remain open-
ended. Thus we might see the project of science, for
example, or social formations, as ongoing or open-
ended narratives, constituted by stories but not stories
in themselves. Leitchs ideas seem to be analogous to
those of Bakhtin, who talks of utterance or text to
cover all those things Leitch would call narrative
However, this distinction between story and narrative
is not as clear as Leitch would have us believe. It
often occurs that an element of one story a
statement, an exclamation, an expletive, a gesture is
taken out of its original context, but this is not to say
that it is now context-less. On the contrary, we might
contend that the element takes on a new significance
as it becomes an element in another telling, a different
story. David Carr (1991), drawing on the work of
Husserl, argues that there is nothing presented to
human consciousness that does not already have a
structure similar to that of narrative. Every event,
action, or experience, at least, is perceived as having a
beginning, a middle and an end, and to unfold over
time. They are not received as potential stories but as
stories in and of themselves. Moreover, each event,
action, or experience is composed of a series of
smaller constituent events, actions or experiences, and
in turn is part of a larger series of events, actions, or
experiences. This accords with Rimmon-Kenans
idea that any single event may be decomposed
into a series of mini events and intermediary
states[and] a vast number of events may be
subsumed under a single event-title. (1989, p. 15).
In this sense of narrative we see that it is ubiquitous,
limitless, and applicable to everything that humans
encounter. As Barthes (1987) states:
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The narratives of the world are numberless.
Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of
genres, themselves distributed amongst different
substances as though any material were fit to
receive mans stories. Able to be carried by
articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or
moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of
all these substances; narrative is present in myth,
legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy,
drama, comedy, mime, paintingstained glass
windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation.
[N]arrative is present in every age, in every place,
in every society; it begins with the very history of
mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people
without narrative. [N]arrative is international,
transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like
life itself. (p. 79).
Of all academic disciplines, literary theory is overtly
the most concerned with narrative as story, and it
generally treats narrative as a product, one that can be
critiqued and repeated, whether in isolation from its
origins of production or as one of the greater body of
such narratives. This product conception of narrative
leads naturally enough to efforts to describe
identifiable structures of narrative story that can be
diagrammed. The Freytag pyramid (Ong, 1988) is
one such diagrammatic description, which finds
popularity in both literary circles and in psychology.
Freytag suggested that story has a typical climactic
linear plot, an upward slope followed by a
downward slope[in which] an ascending action
builds tension, rising to a climactic point, and
which is followed by denouement or untying
(Ong, p. 142). Yet even within the literary world this
is a constricted notion of narrative structure,
outmoded in the realm of the novel since the works of
Flaubert and Cervantes, who introduce greater
degrees of complexity than can be accounted for by a
two-dimensional pyramid. This and other such linear
models fail to account for the structure of stories
arising from purely oral cultures, or for the narratives
of science, of history, of art, of the deaf, or indeed of
everyday life.
Most theorists, however, hang onto to the idea that
stories are structured. Carr suggests the loosest and
perhaps therefore the most adequate structure. His
idea is that story construes a temporal ordering or
configuration, of beginning, middle, and end, which
unfolds over time and stands out from the
background; that it describes a subject, a complex
experience, action, or event; and that it involves a
telling, occurring between a teller and an audience.
Within literary theory the idea of narrative as an
inherently structured text or product as story has
led to a number of differing explanations and
analytical methods. Structuralism arises from this
conception of narrative, and in turn gives rise to post-
structuralism, deconstruction, and a resurgence of
interest in phenomenology and hermeneutics; mainly
because of its limitations. Structuralism, according to
Terry Eagleton (1983) and David Carr, is not
concerned with the content or the meaning of
narratives assuming that textual narrative can be
intrinsically meaningful or their relation to things
external to the text, but only with internal relations;
relations between the apparently interchangeable
elements within the narrative work. For structuralists
there is no continuity between art and life. Art is
envisioned as structured, life as unstructured and
chaotic. Moreover, structuralism cannot deal with the
temporal nature of narrative, its unfolding over time
or its internal treatment of time. Structuralists, rather,
treat narrative as an object in space rather than a
movement in time. (Eagleton, p. 116). Since
narrative is, for them, an atemporal object it cannot
adequately or satisfactorily account for historical
change, or for the changed conditions from which
different cultural literary productions come forth.
Eagleton finds that structuralism exhibits a prudish
evasion of value-judgements, and therefore cannot
distinguish a good piece of literary work from a bus
ticket (p. 122). Structuralism, it seems, takes
narrative product to the extremities of atomistic and
instrumental abstraction.
Structuralism aside, there remains dissension among
literary theorists regarding what constitutes narrative
whether it is the body of literary works that are the
stuff of literary studies, or individual examples from
this body; the recounting of events that fit into a
particular form or structure, or a diversity of such
structures; whether significance and meaning are to
be found inherent in the work, or in active
engagement with the work, or whether the work is
itself a product of a meaning-making process.
Yet such questions tend to mask the narrative
composition of literary theorys own critiques. They
obscure the notion that a story is only a story in its
telling that it unfolds over time. Their methods of
analysis exclude the underlying importance of the
narrative mode of human thought, conceptions, and
activity to human self-consciousness and
consciousness of existence itself. And since literary
theory is careful to maintain the distinction
between the inside of the text and its outside.
(Ricoeur, 1991, p. 26) it evades the function and
intention of narrative, to communicate meaning and
possibilities.

II. NARRATIVE AS MODE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Despite the appropriation of the term narrative by
literary theorists to describe novelistic story, we must
here consider narrative as a broader realm, one in
which, as Barbara Hardy suggests, we
dreamdaydream remember, anticipate, hope
despair, believe, doubt, plan revise, criticise,
construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative
(cited in MacIntyre, 1984, p. 211). Although it is
presupposed in the previous section, we hear or read
very little of narrative as our mode of consciousness
and perception of the world. While this is not the
place for a full dissertation on the nature of
consciousness and perception a few points of view
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will clarify what is meant by narrative mode of
consciousness. In this role we might argue that
narrative both shapes and informs our knowledge of
ourselves as temporal and social beings, and of the
world and is this knowledge.
Paul Ricoeur suggests, a life is no more than a
biological phenomenon as long as it has not been
interpreted. (Ricoeur, 1991, pp. 27-8). His work has
had resounding effects on the theoretical approaches
to and investigations into the nature of narrative. Of
all his ideas, it is perhaps his reworking of Aristotles
mimesis, into a three-stage process, that is most
widely known and cited, and most contentious. His
stages are mimesis
1
, in which the world is received to
perception in a prefigured, pre-narrative or semantic
form; mimesis
2
, in which the pre-narrative reception
is configured into narrative form by emplotment;
and mimesis
3
, the process by which the narrative
transfigures our ideas of that world. This mimetic
representation is not the world, nor an imitation of
the world, but a new creation that allows us to
comprehend the world. And of these three stages, the
first receives most attention, is of concern here, and
therefore deserves a fuller description.
By prefiguration Ricoeur means that the world is
symbolically prefigured for humans, that our
reception of the world is pre-narrative, and that we
understand the world because it is already
articulated in signs, rules and norms; it is always
symbolically mediated. (1991, p. 28). For Ricoeur
all human experience is prefigured semantically and
linguistically; we understand the semantics of action
even before these actions are retold. Ricoeur suggests
that human lived or social reality is mediated by
symbolic representations, which are waiting for
interpretation. Human being-in-the-world is,
accordingly, irreducibly linguistic (DiCenso, 1990).
Ricoeur is not suggesting that thoughts and actions
are always and already narrative but that they are pre-
narrative. The process of turning semantic
understanding into narrative is the second stage of
mimesis, the stage of emplotment or configuration.
For Ricoeur narrative does not emerge until pre-
narrative linguistic and semantic understanding has
been translated, or configured, by emplotment. This
suggests that Ricoeurs idea of emplotment is a
magical creative process that narrative is a
construct invented or imposed by humans on the spur
of each moment of description, explanation or telling.
But Ricoeurs analysis raises a few problems.
Perhaps, as the phenomenologists Husserl and
Merleau-Ponty argue, perception is already a means
of interpreting the world we encounter and is
therefore always already narrative. And if, as Ricoeur
suggests we are receiving the world semantically,
then we are already ordering the world in our very
perception of it. Symbolic, linguistic, or semantic
understanding already suggests an understanding that
relates elements together, that unfolds over time, and
that has already been told and received that has, in
short, a narrative structure and a history. Carr
proposes that humans are intimately and inevitably
connected to their historical past. This past gives
definition to our everyday lives as the ground of our
present-as-experienced, and for conceptions of the
world and conceptions of self and others. It is a pre-
thematic background awareness which pre-figures
cognition. History serves as the horizon and
background for our everyday experience. (Carr, p.
4). And while the narrative nature of history has been
disputed, Carr is suggesting that history follows the
same structures as narrative of identifying
beginnings, middles and ends, of turning a
chronological succession into a configured sequence.
Bakhtin applies himself to the signs, symbols, and
words of human consciousness, and finds that no
words and no symbols are neutral. No natural
phenomena has meaning, only signs (including
words) have meaning. (1986, p. 113). He finds that
signs, symbols and words are given their sense and
meaning through dialogical processes:
The word (or in general any sign) is
interindividual. Everything that is said, expressed, is
located outside the soul of the speaker and does not
belong to him. The word cannot be assigned to a
single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own
inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has
his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the
word before the author comes upon it also have their
rights (after all, there are no words that belong to no
one). The word is a drama in which three characters
participate (1986, pp. 121-2).
The signs, symbols, rules, and norms of our
experience are already mediated by the narratives
through which we have come to know them we
already have a historical and narrative knowledge of
them. Thus if the world is already and always
received semantically, the need to transform this
understanding into narrative begins to look
superfluous.
Carr, too, finds that the world as received to
perception already has a narrative structure. He turns
to the phenomenologist Husserl to explain this idea.
Husserl suggests that memory plays an important role
in maintaining an ongoing consciousness of things as
temporal objects, of things that stay the same and
endure, or of things that change and thus constitute an
event. Consciousness of an event, an action, or an
experience takes into account its succession, the just
previousness that separates memory of this thing
from memory of other things. And akin to this
memory is anticipation of the immediate future, of
how the event is expected to unfold. Husserl calls
these two functions retention and protention. The
field of occurrence consists of the taking together of
both past and future horizons, which consciousness
spans. An event is not perceived as an atemporal
occurrence but is experienced as the retention of the
past and the protention of the future which constitute
the event in the present. For Carr the organising of
events into succession, into story or narrative form, is
not fictional but a true representation of human
perception.
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Additionally, as Carr finds, Ricoeurs conception of
narrative, and particularly of mimesis
1
, reflects the
structuralism that he is seeking to reject. Ricoeur, at
first appearance, seems to run counter to the
structuralist discontinuity between the ordered realm
of art and the chaotic reality of life. However his idea
of pre-figuration is merely a mitigation of this stance.
Ricoeurs pre-figuration is not narrative structure, but
something between it and the discordance, supposed
by structuralism, of discontinuity between the chaos
of lived experience and the imposed narrative order of
art. For Ricoeur, only plot heals this discordance,
bringing harmony and something new to the world by
means of language. Instead of describing the world,
it re-describes it. (Carr, p. 15), a seeing-as, or as
if rather than a seeing or an as. According to
Carrs reading of Ricoeur [t]he ideas of beginning,
middle, and end are not taken from experience: They
are not traits of real action but effects of poetic
ordering.A story redescribes the world, that is, it
describes it as if it were what, presumably, in fact it is
not. (Carr, p. 15).
Thus, for humans the world as encountered cannot be,
as Ricoeur supposes, pre-narrative. To be pre-
narrative it would have to be pre-memory and pre-
consciousness. Before narrative there is instinct, but
ours is more than an instinctual existence.
Philosophers and psychologists alike find that there
are no human instincts that survive infancy, no
automatic behaviours that are not controlled and/or
mediated by social signs, rules and norms by
social narrative. These signs, rules, and norms are
couched in narrative, conceived and received by
narrative consciousnesses, and reproduced and
refigured in narrative communication. Although we
might hear the echoes of this instinctual existence in
some stories or explanations, such as the utilitarian
explanation of what it is to be human, still the
pleasures we are supposed to maximise and the
aversions we minimise are suggested and mediated by
narrative.
If consciousness is narrative in nature, thought, too,
must be framed in narrative. As Bell (1990) suggests,
narrative is a subliminal and primordial process of
shaping thought that occurs at deeper levels than
those planes of reason and evidence. With the
broader definitions of narrative being suggested here
narrative as work or production, and narrative as
mode of consciousness, such that perceptions are
always and already mediated by narrative with these
broader conceptions it seems that Ricoeurs pre-
narrative world is not the world that humans
encounter or inhabit.
Yet even accepting the notion of narrative as the
fundamental mode of consciousness does not explain
how consciousnesses communicate with each other,
how ideas and thoughts are generated and transmitted.
To suspend the analysis of narrative here is to invite
ideas of a narcissistic and egoistic self, of
fragmentation of identity since it is not connected to
the moderating influence of others, and of the
individualism that seems to predominate advanced
capitalistic societies today. The narrative
consciousness itself is not concerned with morality
and ethics, with the struggle for recognition, both of
self and for other, until it connects with other such
consciousnesses. Thus, a simple acceptance of
narrative as thus far explicated masks the idea that
self-consciousness can only arise from connection
with others, that identity is constituted through the
reflections we see of ourselves in others.

III. NARRATIVE AS COMMUNICATION
Thus the third and most important aspect proposed for
consideration is the relation between narrative as
work or product and narrative as mode of
consciousness. The relation is multifaceted, forging
links and relations between the author, the work and
the audience; between individual audience members;
and between various authors, various works and
various audiences. As Bakhtin suggests of any
relations any study of the ordering of parts into a
whole, or any architectonics the relations between
the narrative work and narrative consciousnesses are
never static , but always in the process of being
made or unmade. (Holquist, 1991, p. 29). These
relations, as suggested earlier, may be characterised
as communication, the essence of which, as with any
act, is conscious or unconscious intentionality. We
are agents in the narratives we produce, interact with
and use to communicate.
Not only is there an intended meaning in the narrative
product the expression of ideas, criticisms, feelings,
actions or stories there is also conscious, quasi-
conscious, and unconscious intention in the act of
communicating that message; to respond, to speak
and be heard, to connect to others, to interact, and to
recognise self in actions, to gain recognition from
others, and to come to some recognition of the
intentions of others. The narrative work is the
product of an intentional creative act of a narrative
consciousness. The work is not possible without its
author, and is always the result of some purpose.
Thus to deny authorship of a work, and the
circumstances of its production, is to deny the
purpose of the work to communicate.
There is a relation between the narrative product and
the primary consciousness, the author, in which each
make claims on each other. The work and the author
are intimately linked in the act of creativity. The
work is the result of a plan, the realisation of that
plan, and the interaction and struggle between these
two (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 104). In the process of its
realisation the plan is open to reconsideration and
revision. In its realisation the work is a testament to
the authors intention. The author, through the work,
makes claims to truth, morality, and worth the work
reveals something of these claims to the author,
reflecting back the authors intentions and how well
or otherwise they have been realised. The author
creates the work that, in its creation, affects the
author.
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The narrative work is re-created and re-worked in its
reception by a secondary narrative consciousness.
Ricoeur finds of fictional stories that the composition
of a narrative work is not completed in the text but
in the reader[or] more precisely; the sense or the
significance of a narrative stems from the intersection
of the world of the text and the world of the reader.
(1991, p. 26). Narrative fiction, in other words, can
refigure and transfigure life. The reader moves into
the implicit universe, the horizons of experience of
the text, in imagination, comparing that universe with
her own real or lived (yet already narrative-mediated)
experience of the universe. Something of the author
and the authors world and intention are transmitted to
the receiver, and transforms the receivers
understanding. In engaging with the work the
receiver and the work are transfigured; the receiver is
taken into and re-works the universe of the work,
synthesising it with previous horizons of expectation
and experience, and thus expanding those horizons.
The engaged receiver writes herself into the work as
that work unfolds in her consciousness over time.
She creates a framing narrative for the received
narrative, a frame of critique or evaluation. She
brings the ideas of author to life, at once receiving
and transforming them, and the author brings the
receivers imagination alive through new horizons the
work presents. Narrative relations allow individuals
to become more than the products of their upbringing
and circumstances, more than the conditions of their
existence.
Thus two consciousnesses meet through the vehicle of
the narrative product. The work is both a meeting
place and a meeting (Winterson, 2002), a collision of
consciousnesses in which both the receivers own
consciousness and the narrative product are
transformed. The work becomes a message and
mediation, a vehicle of ideas or information or story.
And the narrative work cannot be encountered as a
monologue. As Bakhtin suggests, any narrative work,
any utterance or story, stands in relation, both
temporal and spatial, to all other narratives,
utterances, or stories, as responses or to be responded
to (Holquist, 1991). Thus the meeting of two
consciousnesses, through the narrative work, is the
beginning of dialogue.
As consciousnesses collide through the vehicle of the
work (and implicitly the works to which it is a
response and the responsive works it will engender)
the narrative work becomes the carrier and instigator
of dialectics about traditions and history, and about
dreams and hopes for the future, and is, thus, the
medium of lived experience of the present. It is the
site of Ricoeurs sedimentation and innovation, of
ideology and utopia. Through engagement with or
creation of the work the narrative consciousness
connects with immediate others, with the family
group, with community, with society at large, and so
with the unknown other. Narrative becomes the glue
of community, the web of culture, the matrix of
society. Narrative communication can now be seen as
a network of past, present and future dialogues:
within the author, between the author and her work;
between the author, her work and her audience,
between individual members of that audience,
between the work and other such works, between
history and possible futures, between individual
consciousnesses and their culture. And through these
various connections, ranging from the intimate to the
abstract, the narrative individual consciousness comes
to realise its unity of physical embodiment and its
individual identity. Character and identity emerge
from the connections.
When two consciousnesses meet through the vehicle
of the narrative work, when the meeting becomes
dialogic, there is the possibility of reflection of self in
other. As such, the meeting is the means by which
self and other, self in other and other in self (where
other is concrete or immediate interlocutor, is nature,
or is an abstraction) are comprehended. In this realm
of communication narrative blossoms into a depth and
richness that cannot be tapped into when
contemplating in isolation narrative as work or
product (as in everyday and literary understandings of
narrative as novelistic story), or narrative as our mode
of consciousness (existentialism and
phenomenology). Narrative suddenly becomes
intentional, creative, interactional, dialogic, emergent
and processual.
Literary theorising that deals with the product, the
work, cannot explain it as a medium for the
transmission of ideas, as a mediation between creator
and receiver which transfigures both, or as the
meeting place of consciousnesses. For literary theory
the product is a static and atemporal work that is the
same no matter when or by whom it is read. But
communication is a unique event, grounded in the
unique circumstances of time and place, and the
unique individuals in which and between which it
occurs. Bakhtin expresses this sentiment when he
writes: it is possible, of course, to reproduce a
textbut the reception of the text by the subject (a
return to it, a repeated reading, a new execution
quotation) is a new, unrepeatable event in the life of
the text, a new link in the historical chain of speech
communication. (1986, p. 106). [To include this and
other quotes here is to illustrate a new execution, or
an element taken from its original context and finding
a new significance in a new narrative work]
Phenomenology, the study of consciousness, cannot
explain the dynamism and breadth of interactions
between consciousnesses that occur with narrative
communication, or the interactions within one
narrative consciousness in response to the reception
of a narrative work. According to Bender (1998) the
early phenomenologists (Berger, Luckman and
Husserl) conceptualise the life of an individual to be
divided into two broad spheres the everyday world
of habitual action, where questions of meaning are
suspended; and the realm of reflection, of pondering
meaning. In the former, specific consciousness of
others, and the objects we encounter, are givens a
pragmatic assumption of similarity and shared
meanings. These phenomenologists find the everyday
WHAT IS NARRATIVE? RICOEUR, BAKHTIN, AND PROCESS 7
Concrescence 2002 Vol.3 pp.1-12 ISSN 1445-4297 AJPT, 2002
is a monolithic here and now (Bender, p.
183), a space of habitualised actions, of routines and
habits, dominated by pragmatic motives and recipe
knowledge. Life is divided into the sphere of
everyday, pragmatic life, and periods of reflection on
this everyday life. This reflection does not
necessarily, or even often, impinge on our behaviour.
But such an analysis has ramifications for identity and
the ethical stance of the individual. It suggests that
ethics and meaning are not a part of prosaic life, but
are located only in the realm of reflection.
Bakhtin, on the other hand, prefers to think that the
ethical, [the] religious, and the meaningful are
constituted and present in each act [that] the unity
of an act and its account, a deed and its meaning,is
something that is never a priori but which must
always and everywhere be achieved (Bell and
Gardiner, 1988, pp. 184-5). The narrative, as product,
as mode of consciousness and as the relation between
the two, can be seen to transcend the spheres of
prosaic action and reflection, to at once link them and
to make each meaningful; indeed, to banish the
duality.
Reflection becomes an act of the introspective
consciousness; prosaic action is informed by
reflection, either on the part of the individual or of
traditions handed down through narrative
communication. For Bakhtin, every action, each act
of existence, is a unique event, occurring in a unique
time and place, to a uniquely situated individual, who
nevertheless shares that uniqueness of time, place and
individuality with every other individual (Holquist).
No action as such is repeatable since each action is
new. And as Carr suggests, even in the unfolding of
an action, there exists a tripartite narration.
While story-telling in its usual social and literary
forms is an intersubjective activity which assumes a
hearers or readers point of view on the events
narrated, this point of view is at times assumed
even by the agent regarding his or her own action,
and by the experiencer on his or her own passive
experiences. Sometimes I do have the sense of
observing myself as if I were observing another
person, and as if I did not understand what that
person was doing and thus needed to be told[a
telling] in which I (the narrator) tell or remind or
explain to myself (the hearer) what I (the character)
am doing. (p. 63).
We are seldom acting without thinking, or thinking
without at the same instant acting. We learn to model
dialogues with ourselves, the dialogues of thought,
between I and me, through this intentional, dialogic,
creative, processual, interactional phenomenon. The
self becomes both object and subject of internal
conversations. Self-reflection and self-consciousness
are made possible by the connections with others; by
the reflections of self in the eyes of the other, by the
model of narrative dialogue, by the content and tone
of the dialogue, and by the struggle for recognition
that is played out in and through the narrative process.
This does not entirely concur with Ricoeurs idea of
identity. He finds that identity is constituted by a
sense of self-constancy and by the appropriation of
stories heard or created. Narrative identity for
Ricoeur is
constitutive of self-constancy, can include
change, mutability, within the cohesion of one
lifetime. The subject then appears both as a reader
and the writer of its own lifethe story if a life
continues to be refigured by all the truthful or fictive
stories a subject tells about himself or herself. This
refiguration makes this life itself a cloth woven of
stories told The self of self-knowledge is the fruit
of an examined life, to recall Socrates phrase in the
Apology. And an examined life is, in large part, one
purged, one clarified by the cathartic effects of the
narratives, be they historical or fictional, conveyed
by our culture. So self-constancy refers to a self
instructed by the works of a culture that it has
applied to itself. (Ricoeur 1985, p. 246-7)
This is reminiscent of the view that human life is
storied, a narrative work, and that consciousness is
narrative, but fails to take account of the idea that
identity is a function of relations, of dialogues and
dialectics, of the struggle for recognition. Indeed,
Ricoeur seems to ignore the Hegelian idea that
identity is constituted in and through the struggle for
recognition, and finds, rather, that it is something
attained by the individual in a seemingly impersonal
and unintentional way; in isolation from and without
the help of others. Provided we have a good library
of novelistic literature, it seems, our identity is
assured. This is, of course, an exaggeration, perhaps
an unfair reading of Ricoeur, but it highlights his
failure to acknowledge the role of concrete,
immediate and actual others in the formation of
identity. We must receive our stories in the first
place, and learn how to receive stories from someone,
from some immediate and actual other, since we are
not born with the skill to read, to interpret, or to speak
only with the capacity to learn these skills.
In a later work Ricoeur changes his mind about the
subject then appear[ing] both as a reader and the
writer of its own life to instead state that we
learn to become the narrator and the hero of our own
story, without actually becoming the author of our
own life. (original italics; 1991, p. 32). He now finds
a difference between narrative life and narrative
fiction; where the narrator of fiction is the author,
while in life we are the narrator but can never be the
author. Yet he does not clarify who or what becomes
the author of our individual lives.
Both MacIntyre and Bakhtin have clear ideas on this
point. For MacIntyre we are never more (and
sometimes less) that the co-authors of our own
narratives. Only in fantasy do we live what story we
please We enter [life] upon a stage which we did
not design and we find ourselves part of an action that
was not of our making. (1984, p. 213). Yet we are
each of us the main character, the hero, in our own
drama, and a subordinate character in the others
8 RANKIN
Concrescence 2002 Vol.3 pp.1-12 ISSN 1445-4297 AJPT, 2002
dramas. From this position we can understand that
identity is not just the fulfilment of personal potential,
nor simply the appropriation of stories, but a dialogic
relation between this potential and the unique
circumstances of place and time in which we live,
brought to fruition through the narrative process of
dialogue. So, while Ricoeur looks for the narrative of
a life, perhaps MacIntyres idea, that we are searching
for a unity of narratives is more adequate.
Bakhtins stance is even further removed from
Ricoeurs than is MacIntyres. He finds we are
authored by the immediate and concrete Other: that
self can never be a self-sufficient construct.
(Holquist, 1991, p. 19). Rather, self is always
dialogic, a relation manifested in dialogue between
self and other. Bakhtin sums up his thoughts thus:
I am conscious of myself and become myself only
while revealing myself for another, through another,
and with the help of another. The most important
acts constituting self-consciousness are determined
by a relationship toward another consciousness
(toward a thou) The very being of man (both
external and internal) is the deepest communication.
To be means to communicate To be means to be
for another, and through the other, for oneself. A
person has no internal sovereign territory, he is
wholly and always on the boundary: looking inside
himself, he looks into the eyes of another I cannot
manage without another, I cannot become myself
without another; I must find myself in another by
finding another in myself (in mutual reflection and
mutual acceptance). (Problems of Dostoevskys
Poetics, 287, cited in Danow, 1991, p. 59).

IV. CONCLUSION
In this essay it has been suggested that narrative can
be defined as a Bakhtinian triad, of the narrative work
or product, of the narrative mode of consciousness,
and of the relation between these two, characterised
as communication. Yet still there is a need to clarify
what the word narrative refers to. Is it a narrative
work, a narrative mode of consciousness, or a
narrative communication? It is not one but all of
these. It is a synthesis of all three, and is thus an
activity and a temporal process. This process entails
the absorbing, synthesising, producing, reproducing
and transforming of a narrative work by a narrative
consciousness, and the transfiguring of a narrative
consciousness by a narrative work, where the purpose
and the end is communication between
consciousnesses. Narrative as such is an ongoing,
emergent and creative process. And since narrative is
a process it is a temporal phenomenon. It is the
vehicle, the means of communication and it is the
communication, as it unfolds over time, between
narrative consciousnesses.
It has also been suggested that identity emerges from
this process of narrative, from the intimate
communication with other that narrative makes
possible. Identity is a phenomenon of temporality
we have a sense of our own endurance, of an
endurance of ourselves as a constant yet changing
entity. Yet this sense can only be comprehended
through narrative communication and can only be
expressed in narrative. Without narrative product,
narrative consciousness or narrative communication
there would be no such comprehension. It was thus
found that Ricoeurs ideas of mimesis
1
, or non-
narrative prefiguration, of narrative identity, as the
combination of self-constancy and the appropriation
of stories, and of the authorship of a life are
somewhat less than adequate. Mimesis
1
does not
account for the narrative structure of perception
suggested by phenomenology, and therefore makes
the transformation from perception to meaning-
making seem magical and fictional. His idea of
narrative identity require further development, since it
does not account sufficiently for the role of the
dialogic relation between consciousnesses. And the
question of the authorship of a life is better dealt with
by MacIntyre and Bakhtin that by Ricoeur. While
Ricoeur has thrown open the doors to the debate
about the importance of narrative to human existence,
supplying a basis from which further investigations
may be launched, his work requires revising,
amending and supplementing. Bakhtin, Carr,
MacIntyre and the phenomenologists all make
significant and substantial contributions to this
ongoing dialectical debate.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Dr. Arran Gare has my heartfelt gratitude for patiently
guiding and supervising my study. His approach
made the writing of this paper possible.


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