1

This paper aims to explore the link between scholarly and fictional narrative,
drawing heavily on the work of Paul Ricoeur, and from this to investigate the
temporal and agential aspects of narrative. I hope, by examining the
relationship between the production and interpretation of scholarly texts, to
propose a more discursive, reflexive, and hermeneutical approach to narrative.
From this narrative can be seen as a point of departure to create a dialogic
understanding of texts, rather than as the conclusion to a process.

Before looking at the role of narrative within a text, as is my aim here, it is only wise to
briefly try to establish what narrative is, or, more precisely, what I mean by the term
narrative. A range of definitions have been proposed and generally follow a similar pattern,
although emphasis on different aspects at the expense of others occurs normally to fit the
purpose of the author.1 Naturally, then, I don’t expect the reader to take as definitive my use
of the term, but instead to engage with it as I have done throughout the text. The scholars and
works that I have chosen to cite are by no means exhaustive but I hope that my selectivity
will be justified in terms of the points I wish to make. In most cases it is accepted that
narrative involves the recounting of events, and therefore contains an unavoidable temporal
aspect. Beyond this it can mean the interrelation of story (the temporal sequence of events)
and discourse (the mode of representation).2 This is how I will be discussing the term, though
a number of other aspects shall creep in to my discussion throughout, including the
contextual and structural nature of a text, and narrative as an expression of human
temporality and identity. The malleable nature of the term shall become evident in my
discussion but I hope that it will be clear that I remain within the general scope of the
definition outlined above.

Narrative marks the meeting point between events and language. Events alone remain as
“remnants of past existence” (Schmidt 2006:118), and language, until spoken, remains a
system (a symbolic order). However when we speak, not only do we enter into the symbolic
order of language, but we create discourse, which must inevitably say something more than
language itself; “discourse locates language in the time of utterance... [and] tells us who is
speaking, and who is spoken to” (Simms 2003:40). Thus events, when related as discourse
are necessarily the representation of the narrator, and not simply an act of perception. It is in
this sense that all genres of narrative are always context bound. No mode of composition can
be viewed as neutral, and therefore none can claim the rights to legitimate social description
(Rosaldo 1993:49).

What I hope to discuss then I shall term ‘scholarly narrative’, by which I mean narrative
that has pretensions of objectivity, despite an acceptance of its impossibility (in contrast to
fictional narrative which I will discuss later). We can include ethnographic accounts and
historical writing within this bracket. I don’t intend to suggest that ethnography and history
are interchangeable, they are two very distinct disciplines but I shall concentrate here on their
shared properties. Insofar as these disciplines hold a degree of truth as their aim (no matter

1 To this extent narrative is a dangerous term in that its definition can be manipulated,
and in this respect falls into a similar category as religion and ethics

2 For a broader definition of ‘what is narrative?’ see Martin McQuillan 2000:4-10

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how we may define this) they are necessarily scientific, but as they must undergo
textualisation, and thus interpretation, their claim to objectivity is destroyed (Simms
2003:88). Both disciplines must attempt to establish facts, but these cannot exist
independently of the author (just as an author cannot exist independently of their discipline,
or social context), and thus must pass through narrative; they are contingent on interpretive
narrativization (McQuillan 2000:262). From this point of view there is an inevitable ethical
dimension to scholarly narrative, the producer takes upon themselves a responsibility, not to
be objective, as this is beyond them, but to reduce the opacity of the text and engage in a
reflexive openness with the reader. The writing is performative in the sense that the events
recounted only come to life within the narrative.

History and ethnography become performative at the level of emplotment; the

arrangement of events, and the censorship through which this emplotment must pass, both
political and linguistic.3 As stories these accounts are not limited to the description of real
cultural events but, for Clifford, “make additional, moral, ideological, and even cosmological
statements” (Clifford and Marcus 1986:98). Clifford and Marcus establish six ways in which
an ethnographic text is determined; contextually, rhetorically, institutionally, generically,
politically, and historically (1986:98). All of these act as filters on the convergence of events
and language in the process of narrativization. But although these preclusions to objectivity
do not mean that scholarly narrative can be reduced to relativism, or justify poetic license, it
is naive to imagine that scholarly narrative and fictional narrative do not overlap. And an
awareness of this, and its exploration, can develop academic writing in a more discursive
way. By discursive I mean a narrative that enters into a dialogue with the reader, that
encourages additional discourse beyond the text. Key to understanding how these two
apparently contrary forms of narrative (scholarly and fictional) come together is the work of
Paul Ricoeur.

Ricoeur, coming from the hermeneutic tradition which gives precedence to the text, sees
language as a ‘liberating force’, rather than the prison house suggested by Nietzsche (Simms
2003:71). Essential to grasping how the analysis of narrative is conducive to understanding is
the concept of mimesis, which Ricoeur develops from Aristotle.4 Mimesis means imitation,
but not in the sense of copying a pre-existing model. It refers to a creative imitation (Ricoeur
1981:292). For Ricoeur mimesis is a dynamic term, it must make reference to action or
activity. Narrative (whether scholarly or fictional) is mimetic of human action because it
represents reality. In this way a ‘hermeneutic circle’ is established whereby narrative imitates
life, and we can learn about life through narrative, hence understanding is continually
widened (Simms 2003:98). The production of narrative is necessarily historically situated, as
it is produced by historical beings, and it is this temporal aspect that all forms of narrative
share, and what Ricoeur terms ‘historicity’ (1981:274). To establish at what point scholarly
and fictional narrative overlap he posits that first it must be accepted that scholarly narrative
contains more fiction than its ambitions to objectivity suggest, and that fiction is more

3 By censorship I do not mean specific political censorship, or even conscious censorship,

but the filter between events as they happen, and their (re)presentation as discourse.

4 Mimesis is another term with a contested definition, loosely these fall into two
categories; Platonic and Aristotelian. Here, we are only concerned with the latter.
 3

mimetic of reality than is normally assumed. From this he suggests that “the historical
condition of man” is therefore the meeting point of the two (1981:289). He goes on to express
how, narrativity being the essential means to portray human experience, our historical
condition requires the conjunction of these two narrative genres in order to find its proper
expression (1981:294). The key therefore to understanding is the awareness of the interplay
between narrativity and the historical condition of man. What I hope to explore later is how
this awareness can lead to a more discursive, reflexive pursuit of scholarly narrative drawing
on the concept of mimesis, but first I think it is important to look into the temporal aspect of
narrative established by Ricoeur, and the effect it has on human experience.

It may be becoming apparent that the subject of narrativity necessarily involves a series of
detours and reiteration as different aspects come to light, but this is why I believe that
hermeneutics, in terms of the hermeneutic circle; “written works have meaning because they
are reflective of life, and life gains meaning through its ability to be represented in written
works” (Simms 2003:2), is an apt point of departure in the exploration of narrative, within
which our lives are bound. For hermeneutics text features as a form of mediation between
man and the world (referentiality), between man and man (communicability), and between
man and himself (self-understanding) (Wood 1991:26). According to Hayden White, what
Ricoeur attempts to portray in his major work Time and Narrative is how temporality is “the
structure of existence that reaches language in narrativity and that narrativity is the language
structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent” (Wood 1991:142).

The key to the temporal aspect of narrativity is what Ricoeur calls its ‘implicit
phenomenology’ (Franzosi 1998:523); that there exists a relationship between discourse and
action, that narrativity marks the convergence of the pre-referential with the symbolic order
of language. Therefore our lives are bound in narrative; they are constructed as stories and
draw on stories. Language, as the symbolic order that we are born into, achieves a level of
transcendence beyond the referential when we attribute to it intentionality, when we construct
our identities around narrative. It is a form of mediation between our traditions and culture
and “the more idiosyncratic world of beliefs, desires and hopes” (Bruner 1990:52). From this
we can grasp Nietzsche’s concept of language as a ‘prison house’. Our traditions, and
therefore our prejudices, are bound in language. It is not something we can emancipate
ourselves from, we are fated to take part in it from our births, and to this extent it can be said,
following Mallarmé, that “language speaks us” (Schmidt 2006:130). But this does not mean
that we should submit to language in a negative sense, instead, like Ricoeur, I would suggest
that language can be a source of liberation, as something we must confront and embrace as
the very essence of our subjectivity.

Our identities therefore, are established through narrative. Although not always
consciously, we construct stories of the past, of events and actions as we produce our own
personal narratives (Kohler-Riessman 1993:2). We make claims on our identities through the
justification of narrative, and so there is an inevitable bias, a foregrounding and
backgrounding of events in order to present ourselves in the best possible light. There is an
inevitable manipulation of personal narrative, just as there is in how we adopt a certain gait,
or a certain style of dress. For Goffman “narrative is inevitably a self representation”
(Kohler-Riessman 1993:11). It is a representation in the sense that it is continual; there is no
 4

single presentation of our self that remains constant. Instead how we present ourselves is
caught up in the temporality of the human historical condition, and thus in narrative, and so
must be a continual re-presentation. We validate our self as we situate it against our cultural
knowledge and in light of relative prescriptive norms that are continually shifting; we are
constantly reacting to expectations imposed upon us by our culture (Schiffrin 1996).

As we alter our tone of voice, or accent, or even dialect when we enter into conversation,
taking into account our interlocutor’s language, class, professional position, and history, as
well as a whole host of other aspects, our aim is not solely to be understood, but to represent
ourselves contextually in the most advantageous terms. I don’t mean to suggest that this is all
done entirely consciously but it shows how we continually interact with narrative in order to
reproduce our personal identities. To return to Ricoeur on the construction of narrative
identity our attention must focus on the question of ‘who?’, of agency. When the question of
‘who?’ arises in terms of an action (i.e. who did this?) the answer cannot merely be a name,
as the action necessarily suggests temporality, and so must be a narrative; “To answer the
question ‘who?’... is to tell the story of a life”, therefore the identity of the ‘who’ must be
narrative identity (Simms 2003:102). To have any identity at all beyond the nominative must
involve narrative. The process of discovering narrative identity “allows one to develop a
sense of oneself as a subject, not as a narcissistic ego but as a self ‘instructed by cultural
symbols’” (Wood 1991:11). The emergence of our selves, as subjects, must take place against
a background of social and cultural expectations and conversely our social and cultural
identities can be established from the form, content, and performance of our personal
narrative (Schiffrin 1996). We construct our identities against our cultural traditions as our
cultural traditions produce the narratives from which our identity emerges.

It may be argued that a hermeneutical approach to a text is necessarily a means to

discovering the ineffable ‘who’, or the narrative identity that constitutes (at least part, if not
all of) our self, as an “active reorganization of our being-in-the-world performed by the
reader following the invitation of the text to become the reader of oneself” (Ricoeur, 1995,
cited in Muldoon 2006:215). And so of what use can this type of reading be in the analysis of
scholarly narrative. But hermeneutics are not limited to a discovery of the self, what they aim
at is opening the temporal and ontological aspects of narrative to the reader. The reader’s
engagement with the text allows for an appreciation of their own situation merged with the
historicity of the narrative.

Narratives, as expressions of our historical condition, are ubiquitous, but as I have touched
upon before, the function of filtration which it performs means that narrative is inevitably a
site of agency. Narrative can be viewed as a site of agency because agency itself is a site of
narrative; we experience our lives as narratives, so therefore any motivation is a priori bound
to narrative. But what is of interest here is agency in terms of power relations, as an exertion
of power. Naturally, this brings us to Foucault. Like Ricoeur, Foucault speaks of the dialectic
between fiction and history but goes on to suggest how these two genres contextually affect
each other; “One ‘fictions’ history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, [and]
one ‘fictions’ a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth” (McQuillan
2000:278). But it is in the context of Foucault’s work on repression, especially through
science, that Doug Kellner see the threat that understanding narrative in this way poses. A
 5

number of things need to be taken into account when confronted with narrative, not least, as
Rabinow reminds us, the narrator’s position within the field of power (Clifford and Marcus
1986:252).

The overlap between fictional and scholarly narrative then, despite being a source for
greater understanding, can also give rise to the use of rhetorical devices in scholarly texts.
There is no definitive methodology for either ethnographic or historical writing, hence the
importance of reflexivity, but this also means that texts need to be analysed not just from the
position of what they say, but in how they say it. The use of authoritative language can
display erudition, but it can also hide a more sinister aspect of scholarly narrative; Rosaldo
points out how the will to truth can be invoked in a text in order to suppress a narrator’s will
to power (Clifford and Marcus 1986:81). He cites the work of Evans-Pritchard and Le Roy
Ladurie as examples of using literary techniques to mask a degree of condescension (Clifford
and Marcus 1986:96). This takes us back to the charge that ‘representation is terrorism’
which to a large degree sparked the deconstruction of scholarly texts and a movement
towards cultural critique with narrative as its foundation.

When the narrative view is established and one is constantly looking beyond the text then
suspicions begin to arise surrounding the sincerity of any particular narrative, one continually
seeks hidden agendas aiming at hegemonic or political control (Bruner 1990:114). Hence the
accusations of colonialism levelled at a number of early ethnographic texts. In truth history
and ethnography are unavoidably prejudiced, as they stem from a particular culture at a
particular point in time, but the rejection of the positivist view of objectivity opened the way
for the rise of the concept of a fictional representation of reality, championed by Frye,
Auerbach and Kenneth Burke (Ricoeur 1981:290). But the narrative turn highlighted not just
the colonialism and cultural bias within scholarly narrative, but also the dominance of male
narratives. Masculinism could thus be questioned in terms of its justifiability, and evidence of
hegemonic domination through narrative meant that the entire traditions of academic writing
had to be reappraised; history was no longer analogous to his story. Umberto Eco pointed out
the methods used, in this case by the media, including backgrounding and foregrounding (in
other words a careful consideration of emphasis), in order to provide an “ideologically biased
reading of social relations” (Franzosi 1998:531). And so, although language may or may not
be innocent, narrative always plays a role in determining the position of a subject within
discourse, to quote Barthes; “No help for it: language is always on the side of power; to speak
is to exercise a will to power: in the space of speech, no innocence, no safety” (McQuillan
2000:25).

But for Barthes the will-to-power is inherent in language itself, and to an extent the author
is helpless as it is language which speaks, not the author. There is therefore a shift in
emphasis from the author to the reader, interpretation usurps authorial agency. The multiple
writings that enter into a dialogue with each other within a text are united in the reader; “the
unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination” (Barthes 1967). What Barthes terms
as the ‘Death of the Author’ means that an explanation directed by the author of a text is
untenable as the identity of the author is lost in the act of writing itself, a text therefore is to
be distinguished, or traversed, instead of penetrated (1967).
 6

Ricoeur agrees that the process of composition is completed in the reader, but does not
entirely dismiss the author; instead the critical moment of analysis of a narrative comes at the
“intersection of the world of the text and the world of the reader” (Wood 1991:26). But what
we must remember is that, just as the author cannot lay claim to objectivity, neither can the
interpreter. Interpretation cannot exist outside of the prejudices, or ‘historical condition’, of
the reader. Barthes claims that the reader must be “a man without history, without biography,
without psychology” (1967) in order to focus his emphasis on the unity of the text in the act
of reading. This may justify the death of the author but in reality both the author and the
reader are positioned subjects (Rosaldo 1993:8). The interpretation of narrative is neither the
sole possession of the author nor the reader, nor the symbolic order of language either.
Understanding only comes as part of an awareness of the relationship forged between all
three. To argue that the open-endedness of the process of interpretation results in relativism,
“a series of displaced meanings with no full stop”, is untenable because the interpretation of
narrative is itself part of history, and at any point in time only “a limited range of canonical
and emergent allegories [are] available to the competent reader” (Clifford and Marcus
1986:110). Just as narrative is temporally structured so too are the prejudices and pre-
suppositions of the interpreter. But as the interpreter approaches a text and interacts with it
their traditions and prejudices are called into question as they are challenged by the text, thus
encouraging the re-evaluation of the interpreter’s horizon by the projection of the text onto it.
As part of the hermeneutic circle, understanding occurs at the fusion of the two horizons
(Schmidt 2006:116). Just as in everyday life when we are confronted with another culture and
we allow our prejudices to be challenged we emerge with a greater understanding both of
how our own life is configured and the make up of the other culture.

This is why I believe that the production and reception of scholarly narratives must
employ a discursive style, and must be self-referential and reflexive if a greater level of
understanding is to be reached in a dialogical relationship. This does not limit historical and
ethnographic writings to getting caught up in language and the infinite regression of
reflexivity, instead it liberates scholarly writing from pseudo-objective texts to be picked
apart by cynical readers into discursive texts to be ‘traversed’ and engaged with, and allows
for “the force and lucidity shown in the most powerful works of the imagination” (Chartier
1997:36). We can’t break down the distance between a text and its production, but we can
make ourselves aware of that distance and explore it as an essential component of the text
itself.

The problem of how we are to establish the value of a scholarly text can be said to remain
unresolved but I don’t believe that this is necessarily discouraging. There is no single
methodology or strict guidelines to be followed in the production of scholarly narrative, and
so it follows that its value can only emerge in dialogue. Mark Whitaker takes a similar
approach to the writing of ethnography, drawing on the work of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s
approach was to reduce the process of philosophical debate into the process of learning which
normally precedes it. In this way acted experiments, or ‘tries’, to understand the complexity
of forms of life, when performed as a ‘public display’, could constitute a form of
philosophical investigation. This would produce a ‘perspicuous representation’ of a form of
life that could be related to others (Whitaker 1996). Thus, when applied to ethnography
 7

representations could be viewed as pedagogic experiments, their value deriving from how
well they establish a lucid contact between the parties, or cultures, involved (Whitaker 1996).

To return to the concept of mimesis as outlined by Ricoeur, narrative as the projection of

the historicity of human experience holds the key to the understanding of that lived
experience. The three key stages to mimesis are prefiguration, as the pre-understanding of
narrative (the historical condition from which interpretation is performed), configuration, as
emplotment (the context and technique of the author’s production of the text), and
refiguration, as “the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the hearer or
reader” from which understanding emerges (Simms 2003:83-86). Our lives are played out in
exactly the same terms; our prefiguration is the culture and language we are born into, out of
which we configure how we live our lives, which we understand through the process of
reflexivity, or refiguration. Once we grasp the role of mimesis in the production of narrative
then our understanding of human action grows through our appreciation of narrative as
mimetic of life, and life as understood, and lived, through narrative. The importance of
Ricoeur is in how he views narrative identity as the “poetic resolution” of the hermeneutical
circle of narrative and temporality (Muldoon 2006:214). Hermeneutics opens up a dialogue
between the production of a text and its reception. The analysis of narrative can therefore go
beyond grasping the hidden agenda or cultural bias of the author to become a point of
departure, rather than a conclusion.

Works Cited

Barthes, R. (1967) ‘The Death of the Author’, Aspen, 5+6.

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Bruner, J. (1990) Acts of Meaning, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Chartier, R. (1997) On the Edge of the Cliff; History, Language, and Practices, Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.

Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (1986) Writing Culture; The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Franzosi, R. (1998) ‘Narrative Analysis - Or why (and how) Sociologists should be interested
in Narrative’, Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 517-54.

Kohler-Riessman, C. (1993) Narrative Analysis, London: Sage Publications.

McQuillan, M. (2000) The Narrative Reader, London: Routledge.

Muldoon, M. (2006) Tricks of Time, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1981) Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge

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Rosaldo, R. (1993) Culture and Truth; The Remaking of Social Analysis, London: Routledge.

Schiffrin, D. (1996) ‘Narrative as Self Portrait; Sociolinguistic Constructions of Identity’,

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Schmidt, L. (2006) Understanding Hermeneutics, Stocksfield: Acumen.

Simms, K. (2003) Paul Ricoeur, London: Routledge.

Whitaker, M. (1996) ‘Ethnography as Learning: A Wittgensteinian approach to writing

ethnographic accounts’, Anthropological Quarterly, 69 (1), 1-13

Wood, D. (1991) On Paul Ricoeur, London: Routledge.