Characteristics of narrative from the perspective of developmental cultural psychology

The third chapter in Jerome Bruner's book "Acts of Meaning" discusses personal narrative and the way it relates to development.

“I have been at great pains to argue (and will argue further later in this chapter) that one of the most ubiquitous and powerful discourse forms in human communication is narrative.” 77

This next part is particularly interesting to me:

“Narrative requires, as mentioned in the preceeding chapter, four crucial grammatical constituents if it is to be effectively carried out. It requires, first, a means for emphasizing human action or “agentivity”—action directioned toward goals controlled by agents. It requires, secondly, that a sequential order be established and maintained—that events and states be “linearized” in a standard way. Narrative, thirdly, also requires a sensitivity to what is canonical and what violates canonicality approximating a narrator’s perspective: it cannot, in the jargon of narratology, be “voiceless.” 77

In this quotation, i think he is referring to language acquisition readiness.

“A second requirement is early readiness to mark the unusual and leave the usual unmarked – to concentrate attention and information processing on the offbeat.” 78.

“Roman Jakobson told us many years ago, the very act of speaking is an act of marking the unusual from the usual.” 79

He argues that we have an “innate” predisposition for narrative structure and that push influences our readiness to learn the basics of narrative before we learn other kinds of logic and structure.

Bruner discusses talking to ourselves on 88 “John Dewey proposed that language provides a way of sorting out our thoughts about the world. . . .” and proceeds to use the example of a little girl named Emily who talked to herself at night, recited books, talks about what she did all day and what she thought she would do tomorrow. I think is fascinating as it relates to childhood, development, storytelling, children’s literature, journal writing, and maybe even prayer.

“But looking closely at the transcripts and listening to the tapes, there were times when we had the irrestible impression that Emily’s leaps forward in speech were fueled by a need to construct meaning, more particularly narrative meaning.”

Finally makes some mention at the end of how in general primatologists and others make too much of an emphasis on how primates (including people) engage in conflict and aggression and fail to note the amazing ways we keep peace, which he doesn’t explicitly say this but it seems that he is getting at narrative as a peace-keeping and conflict-resolving structure (he does say that) and that fact may mean that it has allowed us to evolutionarily select for narrative skills. I’m sure there are other ways to note how narrative is important for maintaining collective society which seems to be a big trait we’ve evolved for. . .

Another text in my mind lately is a chapter from an un-named book by Peggy Miller (the instructor of the cultural developmental psychology class I took my first semester of graduate school) called Narrative Practices: Their role in socialization and self-construction. (I got it in PDF form for class).

This chapter introduces the idea of self-construction which I think is fascinating in relationship to other things I have read and heard about narrative.

“Because both the experience of the self and the events in a story are organized with respect to time, narrative is especially well suited to representing self-continuity.” 160. This of course reminds me of the Radiolab interview with Paul Broks “If you ask me who I am, I’ll tell you a story.” And Robert Krulwich's "my self is the story of what has happened to my body over time." The fact that so often in our psychology readings (these readings included) narrative is tentatively heralded as a cultural universal also lends itself to support of this viewpoint of narrative as a vital way of constructing self.

This particular chapter goes into interesting detail about the ways that cultural values influence how the storyteller casts themselves or another protagonist – for example, the toughness and cleverness valued in the South Baltimore families, the “self-favorability” bias or the tendency to value the kids independence, and how these values then shape the way the narrator creates their own persona in the story.

Finally, there is one more side note that I found to be particularly interesting:

“This brings us to the issue of memory. When approached via personal storytelling, remembering emerges as a process that occurs in the service of something else. Events are not remembered for the sake of remembering, but for the sake of creating tellable stories about the self.” 175.

"An Insane Idiot And His Collection Of Descending-Size Deer Heads"

Also related to this museum/weird stuff collection business. . . but much, much funnier, is this transcript from an old SNL sketch written by none other than Jack Handy. Again, the fact that I have seen this and enjoyed it is because of Jesse Thorn and his wonderful podcasts. :)

An Insane Idiot And His Collection Of Descending-Size Deer Heads

"The Museum of Jurassic Technology"

At the end of our seminar class the other night, we watched a "cheesy" video (Ryan Griffis' description) about the Museum of Jurassic Technology in California.

The film we watched is called "Inhaling the Spore" and focuses on David Wilson, the museum creator, and the magic of his creation. I was thoroughly delighted, overjoyed, and enchanted by the whole film and the people in it, and frantically wrote notes in the dark as we watched.

I wrote:
This guy is the embodiment of it! So curious - accordion-playing on the street, such a wonderful, magical sort of man. Like a wizard.

Old museums are related to a "cabinet of curiosity" and made no distinctions between god-made or man-made, beauty or grotesque. Somehow they were just "out of the realm of ordinary experience."

(Example, the carved fruit stone who's caption card told of the myriad of impossibly complex animals carved into it. It "Plays with your credulity when it comes to those side captions" but there really IS one of those fruit stones to those exact specifications somewhere else.) Its amazing what you will believe because the side caption tells you to.

"We don't know exactly why they laugh, but we think its wonderful." David Wilson says

The book written about this museum is called "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology" by Lawrence Weschler. And I very much want to read it.

on "Travels in Hyperreality"

After listening to one of my absolute favorite episodes of This American Life, called Simulated Worlds for the millionth time, I decided I would actually read Umberto Eco's essay that Ira Glass references in the beginning of the show. I actually read almost all his essays in the collection of them, combined under the aforementioned title. (The other really wonderful one is about blue jeans.) What follows are my notes.

Travels in Hyperreality
Umberto Eco
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers. San Diego, New York, London c. 1983.
Umberto Eco is a novelist, professor of semiotics . .

P. 34
“In an excellent essay on Disneyland as “degenerate utopia” (“a degenerate utopia is an ideology realized in the form of a myth”), Louis Marin analyzed the structure of that 19th century frontier city street that receives entering visitors and distributes them through the various sectors of the magic city.”

This is interesting for this “degenerate utopia” idea and I think I should concentrate more on what that means.

Futher on that,

“In this sense, Disneyland is more hyperrealistic than the wax museum, precisely because the latter still tries to make us believe that what we are seeing reproduces reality absolutely, whereas Disneyland makes it clear that within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced. The Palace of the Living Arts presents its Venus de Milo as almost real, whereas Disneyland can permit itself to present its reconstructions as masterpieces of falsification, for what it sells, indeed, goods, but genuine merchandise, not reproductions. What is falsified is our will to buy, which we take as real, and in this sense Disneyland is really the quintessence of consumer ideology.”

p. 46
“The pleasure of imitation, as the ancients knew, is one of the most innate in the human spirit; but here we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always we inferior to it.”
(this is referring to the “Audio-Animatronic” technique in Disneyland like the pirates of the carribean and how “humans could do no better and would cost more” and so these fakes are better than reality.)

p. 53
“For the distance between Los Angeles and New Orleans is equal to that between Rome and Khartoum, and it is the spatial, as well as the temporal, distance that drives this country to construct not only imitations of the past and of exotic lands but also imitations of itself.”

I think I found this interesting because it talks about kinds of distance ? And I think that distance (temporal, spatial, and cognitive) is . . . interesting.

p. 57
“Where Good, Art, Fairytale, and History, unable to become flesh, must at least become Plastic.” (talking about America, a place where. . .)

p. 275
“The comic seems to belong to the people, liberating, subversive, because it gives license to violate the rule. But it gives such license precisely to those who have so absorbed the rule that they also presume it inviolable. The rule violated by the comic is so acknowledged that there is no need to reaffirm it. That is why carnival can take place only once a year. It takes a year of ritual observance for the violation of the ritual precepts to be enjoyed. . . “

I wonder what Eco would say about the Museum of Jurassic Technology? New thing I learned the other day: Ira Glass' degree is in Semiotics. No wonder he reads from Umberto Eco for like half of that episode! It all makes so much more sense now. :)

Ira Glass on narrative

So obviously someone credited with bringing narrative and literary non-fiction to the fore of radio is going to talk a lot about narrative. :) And this means there is a wonderful selection of resources out there regarding narrative and narrative construction.

One of my favorites is that short series that Ira Glass did for current TV that you can watch on youtube.

• Ira Glass on Storytelling #1
• Ira Glass on Storytelling #2
• Ira Glass on Storytelling #3
• Ira Glass on Storytelling #4

Also, in Jesse Thorn's interview with Ira Glass, they discuss narrative a little. Jesse asks him a great question about whether or not he sees the narrative bias in the media is problematic, to which Ira admits that it can be in a news setting (creates this "horse race" story rather than a presentation of more factual information). I always hear so much praise for narrative, its natural and basically universal presence in human thought and conversation, and its benefits in remembering, relating, and learning information, so it hadn't occurred to me that narrative is not always the best or most effective structure.

They also talked about the Improv everywhere story and Jesse mentioned that he was upset by the fact that the story told on This American Life was not accurate or representative of what Improv Everywhere does or even the spirit of Improv Everywhere. Ira responds, "I have no interest in Improv everywhere" not the straight news story that is representative but rather a story that is compelling b/c it has a plot and characters (in this case, the time when they messed up.) It's not "representative" of the group but it is a good story, the time it didn't work, the time something went wrong. This is a good point about narrative too - the conflict is what makes it interesting.

So it seems that narrative can be problematic in the sense that it demands certain qualities in order to be compelling, and sometimes the reality or truth of the situation doesn't offer those qualities. It reminds me of the psychology studies we were reading in my Developmental Cultural Psychology class about didactic narratives in European-American homes vs. Chinese homes. In the American situation, parents downplay children's wrongdoings and instead highlight what is funny or enjoyable about the child's transgression. And they also love to tell "hell-raising" stories about themselves when they were kids. This is puzzling and maybe even appalling to the Chinese parents, who emphasize respect for elders. My thought while reading these articles was a curiosity about the role that our entertainment-heavy culture has in our own interpersonal storytelling. Do Americans feel the need to make humorous, entertaining stories, casting ourselves as interesting characters and manipulating the narrative to be more compelling than it perhaps really is? How does this compare to other cultures general storytelling practices?

On the merits of Dogs

As a young person, recently graduated from college, full of knowledge and the hope of change and progress, the world seems to be a place of opportunity. It feels as if whatever we have been waiting for has finally arrived - freedom, adulthood. . . It seems to be full of essentially good people, some of which sucumb to terrible vices, but on the whole the net worth of creation is good. This is also an awkward time where we begin to awaken to the reality of beuracracy, selfishness, politics, and falseness. We are beginning to experience disolutionment, disenfranchisement, and disapointment in the greater things we used to admire - our country, religion, the institution of marriage, even the working world.

Dogs, on the otherhand, represent a sweet spirit. An inherently loving, accepting, being. If you ignore them for a week and come home, they are not angry at you for leaving, but thrilled that you are back again. They forgive endlessly. They are the opposition to this criticism and disappointment because they fill their lives with seeking and joy in the simple pursuits of food, attention, play, and sleep. There is no striving, so advancement, just the here and now. They are not so much hedonistic as they are appreciative, grateful, and completely lost in the moment in which they are alive.

Another thing that appeals to me about the dogs - dogs are not capable of irony. I guess there is nothing ironic or affected or cynical about a dog. They simply can't be. And it's wonderful.

There is something honest and straightforward about them, and this appeals to me, but is this enough? [to make them the subject of artwork?] They seem like a refreshing antidote to . . . um . . . everything :)

They offer uncomplicated social interaction - no pretenses. They are happy to see you, you are happy to see them, their tail wags. You can do nothing wrong. You can't talk too much or too little, you , there is no such thing as being akward.

In part, I think that I paint the dogs as a counter to this disapointment. I am trying desperately to ward off cynicism, and something in the sheer joy of these creatures seems to do that.

Benevolence

The following quotes are from Ira Glass in his introduction to the New Kings of Nonfiction.

10
"One thing i love about Weschler and Orlean (and, come to think of most of these writers) is their attitude toward the people they're writing about. Weschler is clearly skeptical of his protagonist, Akumal. Orlean is not in argument with her ten-year old. But they try to get inside their protagonist's heads with a degree of empathy that's unusual. Theirs is a ministry of love, in a way we don't usually discuss reporters feelings toward their subjects. Or at least, they're willing to see what is loveable about the people they're interviewing. (Weschler's an ineresting case when it comes to this, because he's mildly annoyed by his main character for the early part of his story, and then comes to have an ovious and real affection for him.)

14
In that environment, these stories are a kind of beacon. By making stories full of empathy and amusement and the sheer pleasure of discovering the world, these writers reassert the fact that we live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing. They make the world seem like an exciting place to live. I come out of them feeling like a better person -- more awake and more aware and more appreciative of everything around me. That's a hard thing for any kind of writing to accomplish. In times when the media can seem so clueless and beside the point, that's a great comfort in itself."