I'm not a story. But what am I?

This week, I'm returning to Galen Strawson's essay "I am not a story" in Zachary Leader's On Life-Writing –  read the essay on Aeon (the comments on the essay make fascinating reading) – about the relationship between story and identity in more depth, because its implications have been preoccupying me.

In the essay, Strawson challenges the veracity of the claim that we are our life stories. He quotes five or six philosophers, psychologists and novelists supporting this idea, including social psychologist Dan P McAdams:

"Beginning in late adolescence and young adulthood, we construct integrative narratives of the self that selectively recall the past and wishfully anticipate the future to provide our lives with some semblance of unity, purpose, and identity. Personal identity is the internalised and evolving life story that each of us is working on as we move through our adult lives… I… do not really know who I am until I have a good understanding of my narrative identity."

philosopher Daniel Dennett: "We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography"; and Oliver Sacks "Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”… this narrative is us"*.

His basic thesis is that while some, possibly even most people – "narrativists" – view their lives in story form, others, the non-narrativists – amongst whom he situates himself – don't.

It's partly a question of whether you are a diachronic or synchronic type: do you think/feel/view the world and your experiences chronologically, or more laterally? Do you, like Strawson and John Updike "‘have the persistent sensation, in my life…, that I am just beginning’"? It's also about whether you believe, along with many others "that self-narration is a good thing, necessary for a full human life", or whether you have doubts or concerns. One Strawson raises – but dismisses – is the suggestion that if we do story our lives, and do so, as certain writers/thinkers claim, to show ourselves in the best possible light, then we are being inauthentic. He dismisses this because evidence suggests that, in general, we don't.

Grand narrative

Overall, his argument is with the idea of a grand, overarching life-story narrative, as opposed to something less coherent, more fragmentary. As I quoted in last week's post:

"For most of us … I think self-knowledge comes best in bits and pieces".

I wrote then about the relationship of narrative, self-knowledge and wisdom, but have come back to the same subject because it's still nagging at me.

Back in the mid-90s, while working as Serpent's Tail's publicist, I was accompanying the author Pagan Kennedy while she was being interviewed by – if I remember rightly – Tim Adams for The Observer.

The story & the self

It wasn't long after Kennedy had published a graphic 'zine detailing her experiences of ovarian cancer. Adams expressed surprise and even a degree of concern about her willingness to publish such a personal experience (though I imagine he'd be less surprised in 2016). As if she was giving away part of her self.

After the interview, Pagan and I discussed this. From what I remember, neither of us felt that telling even highly personal stories gave away anything of ourselves. The act of revealing personal stories – where it was us doing the revealing, and I'm sure that's crucial – didn't feel exposing. Or like a giving up of the self. Knowing my story (or, rather, stories) doesn't mean someone knows me: self-narrative and the self feel quite different. And telling life stories can be a way of shielding ourselves, a way of keeping others at arms length, of shedding the parts we can do without, like the lizard's tail. A way, in other words, to avoid the dissipation of power.

narrative is power

Perhaps narrative – even more so than knowledge – is power. And the bigger and grander the narrative, the greater the expression of power: at least the power of the narrator over the audience. It's about what's left out, the complex, dissonant stuff. Smaller, more fragmented narratives can accommodate more dissonance.

It's about whether your story looks like this

beautifully explained by Stella Duffy here…

Or like this

Limited edition jigsaw by John Kimpton

… but perhaps with pieces missing.

Overall, the thing about narrative is that it's a function of time. Things happen over time, and that's life – and story. But the grand narrative? I agree with Strawson. That's not life. In fact, it's probably closer to propaganda^…

As for the answer to the question in the title? Nope. Don't have one. And don't necessarily want one. Don't think it matters…

* his examples aren't all male: I've just selected these three for the pithy quotes
^ or Big Fiction. Which I don't have the same objections to, at all…

Narrative transformation: stories and propaganda

In last week's blog – about the boundedness of books, the satisfaction of finishing them, and whether the satisfaction of completion may correlate with the number of possible endings – I started contemplating how I want HayleyWorld's audience to feel when they finish (or finish with) the app.

Overall, I decided, I'm aiming for engaged, amused and informed.

Then marketing specialist and data modeller Dr Stephan Ludwig suggested that what I'm really going for is narrative transportation, and suggested I read The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model: A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers' Narrative Transportation*.

Marketing and literary theory

Narrative transportation is a concept adopted from literary theory by academics exploring marketing techniques and developing theories and frameworks to underpin business practice. It describes what happens to readers  – or "consumers", who interpret stories, where interpretation "constitutes an act of consumption through which a story is converted into a narrative." (p799). In other words, the story is what the author creates, the narrative is what the consumer/reader interprets the story into.

For the marketers, it's about how you use story to induce changes in consumers' feelings, thoughts and beliefs so they buy your product. As the authors of the above essay write: "Given the implications of stories for the narrative persuasion of consumers, nothing is less innocent than a story." (p798). In fact it's surprising that the word "propaganda" fails to appear anywhere in their paper…

That's a digression that I may follow at a later date (in the meantime, Eliane Glaser's Guardian article "The west's hidden propaganda machine" is worth a read). For, now, I want to concentrate on the aspects of Stephan's analysis and the paper that helped me think about how I can make HayleyWorld good enough to enable readers to achieve narrative transportation.

Encourage/manipulate readers to suspend disbelief

 Hayley's story (/stories) needs to be structured, written, edited and delivered in ways that are seamless and persuasive enough influence my readers' feelings, thoughts and beliefs. And to make them want to be influenced. For that to happen, I need to create, edit and deliver the content in ways that spark both their empathy and their imaginations (p799).

In Winning Minds: secrets from the language of leadership, speechwriter Simon Lancaster lays bare the techniques that people devising and delivering persuasive communications use to help/manipulate their audiences to achieve this. The word "minds" in the title doesn't refer only to the plurality of audiences. It also relates to what he defines as our "instinctive", "emotional" and "logical" minds. At each level, we respond better to particular approaches than to others: some metaphors, for instance – those invoking nature, family and journeys – tend to resonate more positively than others invoking, say, war, cars or computers. Repetition helps, rhythm and rhyme impact, as do flattery, humour and alliteration.

Walking the walk

Now it's time for me to put all this into practice. Which means it's likely my next few blog posts will focus on what I'm writing about, rather than about how I'm doing it…


* In the Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 40, No. 5 (February 2014), pp. 797-817, published by the University of Chicago Press