Research Methods for Cultural Studies

why study narrative? opportunities and
problems
If, as I have argued, stories run through social life such that the social world
is itself storied, then it is not enough to simply look for narratives and then
show that they are there. Barbara Czarniawska, after Solow (1988), characterises
this as a ‘Look, Ma, there is a narrative!’ approach (Czarniawska
2004: 41). This, as she points out, is inadequate. The point, rather, is consider
‘the consequences of storytelling – for those who tell the stories and for those
who study them’ (2004: 41) and, I would add, for broader social and cultural
relations.
In this spirit, I want, in this section, to consider what studying narratives can
achieve. In my consideration of what narratives can do, I will highlight two features:
narratives as bridging the divide between self and other, individual and
‘society’; and as bridging the gap between past and present.
Self and Other
stories and the social world 37
Narratives plunge us into a sociality. Whatever stories we tell must challenge
the myth of the atomised individual, for two principal reasons: firstly, because
there is always more than one story to tell about any event, or any life; and
secondly, because we cannot produce stories out of nothing, and must instead
draw on the narrative resources available to us. The multiplicity of narratives
springs, no doubt, from a multiplicity of perspectives. Taking Gina’s narrative
(above), it is easy to consider the ways in which her mother might produce
adifferent narrative, perhaps one that explains her own approach to domestic
life, or even one that refutes Gina’s own. Or, Gina’s children might have
adifferent story to tell about their mother, or about their own childhood.
Furthermore, others’ stories sometimes provide the basis for our own, as intimates
furnish parts of stories that have been forgotten, or (as in the case of early
childhood) furnish the stories themselves. Even memory itself – which is conventionally
understood as being ‘owned’ by the individual – can be seen as
being produced in complex, intersubjective relationships. Jeffrey Prager, for
example, writes of ‘the ways in which the cultural and the interpersonal interpenetrate
in memory, a process generally thought to be purely individual’ and
argues that memories are ‘the result of an individual’s relation to both self and
the outside world’ (2000: 59–60).
In general, people have quite high levels of tolerance for a diversity of interpretations
and hence of narratives, although, as I will discuss below, this variety
is not endless. The point I want to make here, however, is that this very diversity
indicates the ways in which people exist in what we might see as interpretive
collectivities. An attention to narrative reminds us of this.