Narratives LO3393

Ron2785@eworld.com
Mon, 23 Oct 1995 20:13:29 -0700

In a remarkable, and remarkably depressing, essay in the October 23 New
Yorker, dealing with the Simpson trial and, to a lesser extent, the
Million Man March, Henry Louis Gates wove together the impressions and
thoughts of a number of black Americans -- Spike Lee to Jessye Norman to
Rita Dove to Walter Mosley -- and, toward the beginning, states the
following: "People arrive at an understanding of themselves and the world
through narratives -- narratives purveyed by schoolteachers, newscasters,
'authorities,' and all the other authors of our common sense.
Counternarratives are, in turn, the means by which groups contest that
dominant reality and the fretwork of assumptions that supports it.
Sometimes delusion lies that way; sometimes not. There's a sense in which
much of black history is simply counternarrative that has been documented
and legitimatized, by slow, hard-won scholarship...In any case, fealty to
counternarratives is an index to alienation, not to skin color..."

I've been fascinated by this notion of narrative, and now its evil (or
not-so-evil) twin crops up. I hate to trivialize Gates's essay, but I
wonder whether one can map parallel narratives in (now hold your breath,
everyone...) organizational settings. And if so, do the lines EVER cross
(forgetting for the moment about the standard definition of "parallel")?
Can you lay over those parallel narratives other views of the
organization's life cycle? If so, what would you find?

In the same week this essay appeared, Robert Kelly reviewed Umberto Eco's
newly-published (in the US) novel, "The Island of the Day Before." Kelly
writes that the book "is really a book about telling about the utter
necessity of narrative. With our shipwrecked hero, we are in a world in
which the only clarity is the story we tell, which is also our only
escape..." And later: "Only by telling a story can you tell if an idea is
valid. The great speculators are the artists who told the story in wich
we find ourselves, the story in which we, in our turn, create them."

And imagine...Tom Bertels, who's out there on this list, told me about a
conference, to be held next July in New Zealand, on "Metaphor and
Narrative Across the Disciplines."

--
Ron Mallis
ron 2785@eworld.com