It’s probably obvious already from this blog that I love stories: I love them in books, I love them even more incarnate in the theatre. I spent three years getting an English degree merely because it meant (in those heady carefree 1980s) the government would give me enough money to live on while I read stories. More recently, I have been taking a course at my local university on research methods in Education and was delighted to discover that narrative analysis is a valid approach to, for example, analysing a research interview. The fact that people connect and make sense of things by shaping them into a narrative is blindingly obvious as soon as someone says it. And indeed I have noticed (thank you Mr Kahneman, whose excellent book would have had a paragraph in this blog except it grew too long) increasingly frequent references to this approach all around me, especially as a way to interpret and explore seemingly impersonal “data”. At work, considering a student’s performance in their exams, “what’s their story?” is the phrase used to probe more deeply into the individual circumstances. At a conference about “school data”, again the language of “story” and “narrative” was used by the keynote speakers. It makes seemingly static, impersonal numbers fluid, connecting them to people and into a temporal dimension. They came from somewhere: they may be going somewhere.
Most of me rejoices in this (albeit I fear that this might become such an overused linguistic tic in management-speak that it will become stale for a while). I am also wary, however, because “story” can mean many things: a story can engage, illuminate, move, inspire… and it can indicate falsehood. “Telling stories” is one of the most ambiguous phrases I can think of. Words, as TS Eliot gloriously wrote, “slip, slide… will not stay in place, will not stay still”. We cannot map them securely to any underlying reality, or truth. Indeed, their resistance to such reduction is what makes language so interesting. The joy of language is that it is a playmate, an exploration, a recreation. And narrative extends that. Reading Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping recently, I came across this phrase: “there’s another story yet, and if you tell yourself like a story it doesn’t seem so bad”. We use stories to make sense – actively create a pattern and order: to protect ourselves, defend, excuse, disguise and fabricate. Is it making, or making up?
And language has limits. The title quote, from The Winter’s Tale, is spoken by Mamillius, Leontes’ son. The Winter’s Tale is a play full of deep humanity and grace, where lost wife and lost daughter are both restored. But Mamillius dies and goes beyond the reach of the narrative. Which leads us inexorably onto Ben Jonson’s heartbreaking poem, On My First Sonne:
Sometimes, the words are not enough.
lesleyjonesberry 