Research Methods for Cultural Studies

stories and the social world 39
However, the past, being the past, is no longer with us. It lives on only in
representations of itself – in dreams, memories, images, and, above all, in the
stories or narratives which work as means of bringing together these mediated
fragments into another representation – a narrative in which events bring about
other events: a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and (however deferred) an
end. There is, in other words, no unmediated access to the past and, indeed, the
very act of recalling and telling the past is an exercise in interpretation.
To make this point is not simply to notice that memory is unreliable, although
it is. It is to consider, firstly, the significance of memory for narratives – and
especially for life narratives; and, secondly, to foreground the role of interpretation.
Memory is reconstructive (Misztal 2003): what is remembered depends
on what ‘makes sense’ in the context. To remember is not like watching a video
(Hacking 1995). As Carolyn Steedman comments:
We all return to memories and dreams . . . again and again; the story we
tell of our life is reshaped around them. But the point doesn’t lie there,
back in the past, back in the lost time at which they happened; the only
point lies in interpretation. The past is re-used through the agency of
social information, and that interpretation of it can only be made with
what people know of a social world and their place within it. (Steedman
1989: 5)
Steedman herself develops this point in her own exploration of narrative in
Landscape for a Good Woman. Subtitled A story of two lives, this book contains
the story of Steedman’s own life together with that of her mother. These life
narratives are interwoven with social history, fragments of fairy stories, and a
psychoanalytic case study (Freud’s ‘Dora’). The text as a whole is framed by
Steedman’s own analysis of the various narratives contained in the text, as well
as a meta-commentary on narrative itself. Steedman’s text considers individual
biographies in the context of social relations. Indeed, by considering social relations
in their historical and political specificity, she is able to consider why
events become ‘episodes’ at all.
It is difficult to summarise this complex text, but one of its striking features
is the ways in which Steedman embeds her own autobiography within the lives
of others, and within the historical contexts of her parents’ and grandparents’
worlds. She embeds it, too, within a political analysis which highlights the peculiar
marginality and estrangement of the ‘clever’ working-class girl growing up
in the mid-twentieth century. Thus, Landscape illustrates the two features of
narrative’s bridging work that I am highlighting here (self/other; past/present)
and also demonstrates the broader point that all stories are told from a particular
point of view. The following passage gives a sense of this embeddedness and
these interconnections: