A life in stories

I guess I started being interested in narrative power when I was about 15. As an unread working-class teenage boy and young man born in Wood Green, London, I struggled for a few years with the possibility of being homosexual. This was England in the early 1960s and homosexuality was stigmatized as sin, sickness, crime and tragedy. (It still is today in much of the world.) Everywhere I turned, I heard stories and saw images that suggested my being was a problem and I was doomed for a tragic existence. My life became a dialogue with queer stories. Watching the film Victim in 1961 displayed this only too clearly. Here was the story of a life of queer-bashing, blackmail, therapy, prison, darkness, sorrow and ultimately suicide. If I was to believe this dominant powerful narrative of the day, could this well be my own pathetic life story? Maybe. If I had been born any earlier, this may have been my fate, as it certainly was for a great many. But I was also a child of the countercultural 1960s and challenging counter-narratives were in the making. Among these was the emerging powerful, positive story of Gay Pride and Gay Rights: ‘Sing if you’re glad to be gay, sing if you are happy that way.’ A few lawyers were beginning to tell new stories to change the law; some psychiatrists were reworking their scripts of sickness into health; and a new language and culture of stories was starting to be told that gave us new visions. A new narrative, and imagery, were in the making and I was living them: the ‘Coming Out as Gay or Lesbian’ story became a growing genre of writing and film and eventually appeared in many countries across the world. Slowly, new possibilities were being sensed. I seized the moment, as we say, and started to refashion my little youthful life and world through these new tales. My life was not to be downtrodden: I was not going to live in the closet; I was going to make sure I could lead a life where I could be an out gay man. And this is more or less what happened, and very quickly. The old story was discarded, the new one shaped and adopted. The counter-stories of social movements changed my life. But I also learnt that stories are never finished – there is a kaleidoscope of sensibilities around them, and they will keep moving on.¹

Retrospectively, I can see unfolding in all of this a major genre of storytelling, which has sculptured many little lives and big political moments: a self-fulfilling narrative. Stories become grounded in everyday life, have consequences, shape outcomes, change lives and sometimes become self-amplifying: telling the story helps bring about what it tells. This means we had better be careful what stories we tell. I was lucky to find new stories in the making: the old ones would have made my life very unhappy. I slowly learnt that stories have a history, and their right moment matters a great deal.

And, indeed, since the mid-1970s, I have spent a life academically engaged with stories. Initially examining a wide range of stories about the sexually diverse, I argued for the significance of narrative and story research as a powerful method for the social sciences (in my first publications ‘Doing Life Histories’ (Faraday and Plummer, 1979) and Documents of Life (Plummer, [1983] 2001)). Over the subsequent years, I have increasingly tried to develop an approach that is less concerned with literary narrative and more with the sociological, ethical and political importance of storytelling and listening: there is an ecology of narratives in which stories are assembled, understood, given value and lived through our actions in the world. This was most clearly set out in my book Telling Sexual Stories (Plummer, 1995), which offered a sociology of stories and then applied it to the field of sexualities.

And so it seems that I have been living with narrative power all my life, even if I did not quite realize it at the time; and it has now become the prime focus of this study. This new book has been simmering within me for many years. My question, simply put, is: How does narrative shape power and how does power shape narrative? My focus is on power–narrative interaction, a dialogue in which each feeds on the other, is emergent and generates change. I ultimately look to a world where narrative acts and narrative power make for better worlds. As they have for me.

Both narrative and power have existed everywhere since the beginning of human time. They are ubiquitous, and at the start of the twenty-first century there is an explosion of new forms. As I was writing this book, there was never a day when issues of narrative power were not prominent: Trump’s ‘fake media’, the Brexit divide, terrorist stories, ‘Putin’, the clash over the environment, the refugee crisis, Syria, Yemen, the dangers of the digital world of tweets and surveillance, the emergence of the story of ‘Trans’, the sexual harassment stories of #MeToo and Weinstein, Hollywood and the UK Parliament. As each of them flagged a significant narrative crisis or muddle, I wondered whether there had there been any progress in our narrative understanding and skills since Aristotle’s famous discussion of rhetoric and poetics (Aristotle, 1991, 1996). They provided little hope that a civilized, caring modern narrative world was at work here. And yet, at the same time, every day I exchanged good stories with people of all kinds, watched videos, read books, visited art galleries, went to the theatre, listened to music and experienced the omnipresent joy of narratives at their best.

Taking a stance

Folk have written a lot about stories, life stories, narratives, discourse and what is often called ‘narratology’. My focus here is selective: on how stories work socially and politically, highlighting the generic features that underpin a great many different stories. I will mention many tales, but I have no space to illustrate any of them in great detail. Readers looking for extended discussions of any specific story will not find them. (I have chosen, for example, largely to bypass Trump and Brexit where there is already a huge industry discussing them.) Nor am I concerned with fiction. My main focus is on tales of suffering in documentary reality: these stories are grounded in real life. There will be leakage all around – indeed, the very distinction of what is reality and what is fiction will become central as we move on. I also write at a time of cataclysmic change: digital stories are reworking classical storytelling. I live myself as a migrant in time. Having lived half my life with the classical modern narrative, I have since lived in a world where digital narratives have rapidly taken over. I now stand at this vital threshold and confront it as best I can.

Within this study, two rather different books jostle to appear. First, I attempt to produce a grounded, intellectually serious account of narrative power, highlighting its many elements but especially the idea of narrative actions. I do this by looking at a range of stories that give us down-to-earth problems to think about, and using them to suggest a few wider patterns.

This is how the book starts and ends; and along the way you will be introduced to a wide array of stories. But second, the book is also a very personal one. It is driven by my own personal, political and normative concerns about human suffering, the struggle for human value, and the precarious narrative muddle we keep making for ourselves.

Each chapter is discrete and problem-focused – drawing out its own questions, examples and ideas. Underpinning all this is a critical humanist stance: a stance that is analytic, theoretical, methodological, ethical and political.² It simply takes the complex, grounded human life as a key starting point, even as it must also immediately be located in its insignificance in a vast pluriverse of time and space. Ultimately, it links to progressive egalitarian, humanitarian and caring values and politics: here are emancipations that lead globally to a better world for all and not just the few. As people make their own narratives – but not usually in moments and structures of their own choosing – a politics of empowerment and an enhancement of lives become possible, creating new opportunities for better worlds. I recognize there are no grand truths, no grand theories, no grand narratives and no grand answers in this politics of narrative humanity – even though we have often to act as if there are. Our human world and our humanity are an indelibly risky business. Even as stories are there to help us, they are perpetually fragile.

The stories to come

We will see over and over again a standard catechism of stories. They establish scenes, characters, values and plots with beginnings, middles and endings: themes are established, troubles developed, and ultimately some kind of resolution is attained. This seems to be a basic universal grammar of storytelling. And I have set this book up in this classical mode. But my tone and moods change as the stories unfold.

I start with an Overture of puzzlement and vision: with a range of illustrative stories around human suffering that will give a good sense of issues and motifs to come. In Act 1, I set the scene by providing a more formal and abstract statement of the key features of narrative power (chapter 2). I then look at a few of the major stories of power and set them in dialogues with the power of stories (chapter 3). In Act 2, I look at the fragility of our narratives and how this arises from five key sources. I now become more concerned and critical as I examine areas where human beings suffer while doing narrative work: through narrative inequality (chapter 4); through a changing media, especially the riskiness of narrative digitalism (chapter 5); through the different dangers of living with complex modern narrative states (chapter 6); through a troubling reality puzzle which makes the line between truth and fiction a universal, historical problem (chapter 7); and, finally, through the contingencies that shape our stories over time (chapter 8). Act 3 then suggests the possibility of narrative hope – a better world of stories that can be shaped by a politics of narrative humanity. This final section (chapter 9) then becomes much more explicitly normative and political, looking for re-valuations, imaginaries and new political acts in a world fast heading along a road to disaster. We need a better narrative world: here I highlight the importance of developing narrative wisdom and narrative trust, making modest grounded proposals for a new politics of narrative humanity as we move into a digital and cosmopolitan world.

Ultimately, the book leads to a series of meditations about what humanity values – in a world that has now been reduced to an overwhelming crass economic and commercial narrative of life. The book becomes a re-valuation: a critical, analytic provocation, providing tools for making sense of narratives now, and to dream afresh about what could be done in the future – the futures of stories in a challenged world. My tale is a tale of how bad stories can drive out good stories, of how many ‘stories of the good’ get silenced, but how eventually good stories may just triumph. In the closing chapter, I am ultimately asking the big question: How can we build sustainable stories that support the progress of our world and our humanities?