ES3209: Dreamworld Children

Week 11: Narratives and Social Action

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last updated 01.12.09.

Introduction

These notes also form the basis for an attachment that is used in ES2207 - What is a Child?  They have been modified for this module's work, but if you have already come across these ideas, you will find that although the illustrations have changed, the form of analysis is essentially the same.

An Initial Theorisation - how the analysis of narrative might be extended to accommodate political evaluation and social action. 

Darko Suvin, a Marxist, provides us with an overview which I have adapted and provide at the bottom of these notes in tabular form.  The article on which this is based was intended to suggest how literature could be brought into political thought, and his focus was on a specific intertext: that between fictional and other ways of viewing, interpreting, and constructing reality.  In relation to the many literary representations of utopias and dystopias, his argument is particularly pertinent.  In case the point gets lost because of the detail - what he offers is essentially an argument about the central importance of narrativisation to social experience. 

A paraphrase of Suvin's fundamental critical position is:-

People, children, and babies - in the bourgeois individualist sense - cannot be adequately represented in fiction because of the complexities of social implication within which they are actually immersed.  Located within narratives they become either exemplars of a particular type, or shifting centres of perception for the story-telling interests of the author.  Nonetheless, socially pertinent and crucial relationships among people can be represented, allowing the reader to re-articulate their understanding of contemporary human relationships in the lived world of people and things.

'People' here refers to individual women, men and children, rather than the people, i.e., in the German sense of das Volk.  Suvin suggests that the kind of 'images' of people developed in nineteenth century narratives must remain the principal yardstick by which political analysis of a text should begin.  If the characters or principal objects are not clearly delimited in the text one cannot attempt a convincing political analysis.  This is a large claim and should be understood as being potentially a slap in the face for much modernist writing in which characters often only 'emerge' from the accretion of apparently disconnected fragments of narrative, description, etc.  Frederic Jameson's analysis of Hard Times provides an example of how the lives and decisions of the characters are made to carry the burden of demonstration for the social 'themes' which are to be represented, e.g., the imagination (James Harthouse), the love of facts (Gradgrind initially, and his protégé, Bitzer), the importance of sympathy (Sissy Jupe), etc.  Suvin's analysis should therefore illustrate for us how the nature of literary figuration may determine the representation of 'interests' and therefore their politics - with a small 'p'.  A reviewer writes ...

What is at stake, politically, in this formulation is whether or not there is sufficient justification - politically usable and ethically justifiable - for a cognitive engagement with fiction.  This is an extrinsic stance towards culture, i.e., we pretend we can stand outside of our culture and criticise its existing norms.  According to Suvin, one thing that fiction and art in general - the fusion of conceptualisation and sensuality - can teach us is that phenomena only exist in given forms: not to exist in a given way means not to exist.  So fiction becomes a form of political act, but this in turn implies political judgement about which norms should be questioned, which endorsed.

This rather overstates its case, in declaring that the viewpoint Suvin argues for is 'outside culture' - the point could be made by simply suggesting that the viewpoint steps outside of the social systems typical functional elements, i.e., Suvin deliberately steps outside of the field of entertainment, but remains firmly within society in general, and within the field of politics and the desire for social change in particular.  Suvin is not saying that the practice of fiction is better than direct political action, i.e., manning the barricades, joining a political party, or lobbying for particular outcomes in Parliament, etc.  Instead his claim is that fiction is an indispensable aid to change in political thinking and imagination - and this may lead to subsequent action.  For Suvin, fiction or narrative (in the wide sense of telling a story with agents and space/time) is inextricably enmeshed with all social practice - we eventually end up living the narratives that we find most convincing - always bearing in mind that life never is itself a narrative - any more than is history understood as 'merely' the succession of events.

If people are represented in fiction as a selection, condensation, and displacement of surface empirical events - and the ruling ideological way of seeing them - if they are seen as in a partially steerable daydream, then representation is not to be understood as simple copying.

Suvin is in no doubt that our social thinking and social practice is based on models.  From this theoretical perspective, representation in fiction becomes a process of taking model images of people from non-fictional settings and constructing a model of social reality which then has consequences for the reader's life.  An ideal description of the reception of a new text would be as follows, according to Suvin:-

The new images go about subverting the heretofore received fictional norms of agential structuring, but as this is happening, the images themselves are in turn modified in and by some autonomous principles of fictional structuring.  All of this together enables the resulting views of relationships among people, elaborated by the restructured piece of fiction, to return into our understanding of reality or ideology with a cognitive increment. …. presenting images taken from outside fiction as propositions or formative hypotheses for narrative, but also presenting images transmogrified within fiction as proposals to the pragmatic world (Suvin's italics).

  Translating this, we get the following sequence: the reader starts with a range of expected narrativisations of personal action and social experience, and the new forms offer alternatives - Suvin implies that they are critical - intended to question these existing understandings and even substitute them with new narratives of what it is to be a person and to live a social life; but there are general understandings of fictional thinking about persons, and these offer resistance to the new; taken together, the reader experiences this dialectical process as an education - a 'cognitive increment' - one which may encourage us to widen the scope of our understandings of how social life and its experience can be narrativised, both for ourselves and for others.  (You may also find it useful to review this approach with that developed by Gaston Bachelard - see, for instance, his Poetics of Space.) 

Suvin's Analysis of Narrative and Narrative Agents (abridged and simplified)

Start off by thinking of a fictional character, such as Vashti and begin at the top left of this table.  Suvin suggests there are three steps in analysis which follow - identify the character, decide what kind of model they represent, and then see if you can fit this model into a word that describes their role in the narrative.  Finally, reflect upon the extent to which this model agent corresponds to some aspect of the social world - either your contemporary one, or the one you surmise existed for the author.   This is very important, because doing this for your principal characters will get you started on ideas about how to tackle some of the subsequent rows - you are essentially re-tracing one dimension of the steps which Forster, for instance, went through in setting up the character of Vashti.  She is principally a mother, his principal focus, and the agent who undergoes changes to her character that correspond to the changes in society that Forster proposes as an antidote to the threats created by his own society - one increasingly reliant on technology.  The comments I have added in colour illustrate how 'When the Machine Stops' and Lord of the Flies might feature in this diagram, along with some of the other texts and their protagonists.

Notes

1. From Suvin, D. 'Towards a Theory of Narrative Agents and a Materialist Critique beyond Technocracy or Reductionism' in Nelson, C. & Grossberg, L., Eds. (1988) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Basingstoke, Macmillan, pp. 663 - 696.