“We human beings are hopelessly hermeneutical beings. We can’t help but make up stories—be they ‘true’ or ‘false’ or somewhere in between—to make sense of our lives, ourselves, our worlds. This volume, an impressive collection of solid and wide-ranging scholarship, constitutes a searching, sorely needed meditation on the role of the narrative turn itself in both contributing to and countering the emergence of our so-called post-truth age. It’s a book which narrativists in every field, not to mention politicians of every stripe, should take seriously indeed.”
William
L. Randall, author of The Narrative Complexity ofOrdinary Life
“How can we humans live amid increasingly violent conflicting interpretations of our world and each other? These essays allow readers to judge how far narrative hermeneutics can help with this troubling problem.”
—Arthur Frank, author of LettingStoriesBreatheand KingLear: Shakespeare’sDarkConsolations
Explorations in Narrative Psychology
Mark Freeman
Series Editor
Books in the Series
Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative in Conflict Resolution
Sara Cobb
Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life
Molly Andrews
Narratives of Positive Aging: Seaside Stories
Amia Lieblich
Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process
Jens Brockmeier
The Narrative Complexity of Ordinary Life: Tales from the Coffee Shop
William L. Randall
Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists
Laura Otis
Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience
Editedby Brian Schiff, A. Elizabeth McKim, and Sylvie Patron
Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust
Roger Frie
A New Narrative for Psychology
Brian Schiff
Decolonizing Psychology: Globalization, Social Justice, and Indian Youth Identities
Sunil Bhatia
Entangled Narratives: Collaborative Storytelling and the Re-Imagining of Dementia
Lars-Christer Hydén
The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible
Hanna Meretoja
Words and Wounds: Narratives of Exile
Sean Akerman
Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative
Mark Davis and Davina Lohm
Stories Changing Lives: Narratives and Paths toward Social Change
Editedby Corinne Squire
Narrative and Cultural Humility: Reflections from “The Good Witch” Teaching Psychotherapy in China
Ruthellen Josselson
The Use and Abuse of Stories
New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics
Editedby HANNA MERETOJA & MARK FREEMAN
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
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You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Title: The use and abuse of stories : new directions in narrative hermeneutics / [edited by] Hanna Meretoja, Mark Freeman. Description: New York, NY: Oxford University Press, [2023] | Series: Explorations in narrative psych series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060518
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060519
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197571026.001.0001
Contents
Contributors
Introduction: Challenges and Prospects of Narrative Hermeneuti cs in Tumultuous Times
HannaMeretojaandMarkFreeman
PART I POLITICS OF STORYTELLING
1. The Inevitability, and Danger, of Narrative
MarkFreeman
2. Testimony: Truth, Lies, and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion
ColinDavis
3. Hermeneutic Awareness in Uncertain Times: Post-Truth, Narrati ve Agency, and Existential Diminishment
HannaMeretoja
PART II UNDERSTANDING THE SELF
4. Verstehen and Narrative
JensBrockmeier
5. “Be Loyal to the Story”: Sorrow, Narrative, and Truth-Telling
MollyAndrews
6. Narrative as an Interpretation of Self-Pattern
ShaunGallagher
7. Speaking of Elves, Dragons, and Werewolves: Narrative Herme neutics and Other-than-Human Identities
CliveBaldwin,LaurenRipley,andShaniaArsenault
PART III UNDERSTANDING THE OTHER
8. Identity, Understanding, and Narrative
GeorgiaWarnke
9. Found in Translation: Solicitude and Linguistic Hospitality in Sto rytelling
AndreeaDeciuRitivoi
10. The Hermeneutics of Darkness: Interpreting Perpetrators on Th eir Crimes
BrianSchiff,KayleeAltimore,andGenevieveBougher
11. Perpetrator Histories, Silencing and Untold Stories: A View from Contemporary Psychoanalysis
RogerFrie
PART IV NARRATIVE PRACTICES
12. Literary and Film Narratives
JakobLothe
13. Queer Perspectives on Narrative Practices in Asylum Politics
AdaSchwanck
14. Narrative Medicine: The Book at the Gates of Biomedicine
DanielleSpencer
15. Psychiatric Truth and Narrative Hermeneutics
BradleyLewis
Index
Contributors
Kaylee Altimore is a graduate of the American University of Paris with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Globalization and a minor in Linguistics.
Molly Andrews is Honorary Professor of Political Psychology at the Social Research Institute, University College London, and the codirector of the Association of Narrative Research and Practice. In 2019–2020, she was the Jane and Aatos Erkko Visiting Professor in Studies on Contemporary Society at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her books include Lifetimes of Commitment: Aging, Politics, Psychology and Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change (both Cambridge University Press 1991 and 2007) and Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life (Oxford University Press 2014). She serves on the Editorial Board of five journals which are published in four countries, and her publications have appeared in Chinese, German, Swedish, Spanish, French, Czech, German, Norwegian, and Finnish.
Shania Arsenault is a recent Honors graduate from St. Thomas University. From Prince Edward Island, she is passionate about criminology and media. She has been awarded the Dr. Rosemary Clews Internship, the Harrison McCain Research Internship, and the Mitacs Research Training award, where she contributed to various transmedia projects used for education regarding child welfare, new religious movements, and transableism.
Clive Baldwin is Professor of Social Work at St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. His research program focuses on narrative identity and includes narratives of suspected child abuse, transability (the desire to acquire a physical impairment), other-than-human identities, and spiritual identity among members
of new religious movements and practitioners of alternative spiritualities. He has published extensively on narrative identity, narrative ethics, and personhood in dementia.
Genevieve Bougher is a graduate of the American University of Paris with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in History and International and Comparative Politics.
Jens Brockmeier is Professor of Psychology at the American University of Paris. He received his degrees in psychology, philosophy, and linguistics/literary theory from the Free University Berlin where he took on his first appointment as Assistant Professor of Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Since then, he has held teaching and research appointments at the University of Toronto, the New School New York, and Linacre College Oxford, among others, before he joined the American University of Paris in 2014. His research is concerned with the cultural fabric of mind and language, which he has examined in a variety of cultural contexts and under conditions of health and illness. His book Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process was published by Oxford University Press in 2015.
Colin Davis is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research is principally in the field of twentieth-century French literature, thought, and film, with interests including ethics, ethical criticism, Holocaust literature, recent fiction, and the connections between philosophy, fiction, and film. His most recent books are Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing (Liverpool University Press 2018), Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative, co-edited with Hanna Meretoja (Routledge 2018), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, co-edited with Hanna Meretoja (Routledge 2020), and SilentRenoir:Philosophy andtheInterpretationofSilent Film(Palgrave Macmillan 2021).
Mark Freeman is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society in the Department of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross and
is the author of numerous works, including Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (Routledge 1993); Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward (Oxford University Press 2010); ThePriorityoftheOther:ThinkingandLivingBeyondtheSelf (Oxford University Press 2014); and, most recently, DoILookatYou with Love? Reimaging the Story of Dementia (Brill | Sense 2021). Winner of the Theodore R. Sarbin Award from the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology and the Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Psychological Foundation. Freeman is a Fellow in the American Psychological Association and also serves as Editor for the Oxford University Press series “Explorations in Narrative Psychology.”
Roger Frie is Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University; Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver; and Psychoanalytic Faculty and Supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute, New York. He is a historian and philosopher as well as a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice. He has published and lectured widely on the interdisciplinary themes of historical responsibility and cultural memory. He is author most recently of Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (Oxford University Press 2017) and co-editor of Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis(Routledge 2022).
Shaun Gallagher, PhD, Hon DPhil, is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis and Professorial Fellow at the School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia. He was a Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Fellow (2012–2018). He has held honorary professorships at Tromsø University, Norway; Durham University, in the United Kingdom; and Copenhagen University, Denmark, and visiting positions at universities in Cambridge, Lyon, Paris, Berlin, Oxford, and Rome. His areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of mind, embodied cognition, social interaction, concepts of self, and hermeneutics. His publications include Action and Interaction (Oxford University Press 2020); Performance/Art: The
Venetian Lectures (Milan 2021); The Phenomenological Mind, 3rd edition (Routledge 2021); Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Oxford University Press 2017); The Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder (Palgrave Macmillan 2015); Phenomenology (Palgrave Macmillan 2012); How the BodyShapestheMind(Oxford University Press 2005); as editor, the Oxford Handbook of the Self (Oxford University Press 2011); and co-editor TheOxfordHandbook of 4ECognition. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology andtheCognitiveSciences.
Bradley Lewis, MD, PhD, is Associate Professor at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and has affiliations with the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, the Disability Studies Program, and the Medical Humanities Division. He is a practicing psychiatrist and has interdisciplinary training in the arts, humanities, and continental philosophy. His writings include Narrative Psychiatry: How Stories Can Shape Clinical Encounters (Johns Hopkins University Press 2011) and Depression: Integrating Science, Humanities, and Culture (Routledge 2012). He is currently working on two book projects: a mad studies reader and an exploration of epiphanies in literature and cinema.
Jakob Lothe is Professor of English literature at the University of Oslo. His books include Conrad’s Narrative Method and Narrative in FictionandFilm(both from Oxford University Press 1989 and 2000), and he is co-editor of four volumes in the “Theory and Interpretation of Narrative” series published by Ohio State University Press.
Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality, and Memory at the University of Turku (Finland), Member of Academia Europaea, Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, University of Oxford (2019–2020 and spring 2023), and Principal Investigator in the Academy of Finland research consortium “Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New StoryCritical Narrative Theory” (2018–2023). Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the
Possible (Oxford University Press 2018) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), and she has coedited, with Colin Davis, TheRoutledgeCompaniontoLiteratureand Trauma (2020) and Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (Routledge 2018); with Eneken Laanes, the MemoryStudiesspecial issue “Cultural Memorial Forms” (2021); and with Maria Mäkelä, the Poetics Today special issue “Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom” (2022).
Lauren Ripley is a graduate of the School of Social Work, St. Thomas University. She and Dr. Baldwin have worked together on several projects, and she has written about and presented on otherthan-human identities at multiple conferences. Her research interests lie in spirituality and narrative identity. She is currently working as a social worker in Nova Scotia.
Andreea Deciu Ritivoi is William S. Dietrich Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as co-editor of the narrative studies journal Storyworlds. Her research interests include political rhetoric, interpretation theory, narrative studies, and exile. She is the author of three monographs: Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity (Rowman and Littlefield 2002); Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory (SUNY Press 2006); Intimate Strangers: Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Edward Said in American Political Discourse (Columbia University Press 2014). She is editor or co-editor of three volumes: Interpretation and Its Objects (Rodopi Press 2003); Outrage! Controversy, Art, and Society (Palgrave MacMillan 2012, with Richard Howells and Judith Schachter); and Interpretation, Relativism, and Identity (Lexington Press 2018, with Christine Koggel) and numerous articles.
Brian Schiff is Esmond Nissim Professor of Psychology; Director of the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights, and Conflict Prevention; and Chair of the Department of Psychology, Health, and Gender. He is author of ANew Narrative forPsychology(Oxford University Press 2017) and has co-edited Life
andNarrative: TheRisksandResponsibilitiesofStoryingExperience (Oxford University Press 2017).
Ada Schwanck, MA, Doctoral Researcher, is finalizing her dissertation in the field of gender studies. She conducts her doctoral research project in the doctoral programme in Gender, Culture, and Society (SKY) at the University of Helsinki. In her research, she combines narrative hermeneutics with queer migration studies to investigate narrative practices around asylum and refugee politics and policies in media, documentary films, novels, and art projects from feminist and queer perspectives. She teaches courses on feminist theory, gender and culture, and narrative methods.
Danielle Spencer, PhD, is Academic Director of the Columbia University Narrative Medicine Program. Author of Metagnosis: RevelatoryNarrativesofHealthandIdentity(Oxford University Press 2021) and co-author of Perkins Prize–winning The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (Oxford University Press 2017), her scholarly and creative work appears in diverse outlets from The Lancetto Ploughshares.
Georgia Warnke is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Riverside. She writes on issues in critical social theory, Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, and contemporary feminism.
Introduction
Challenges and Prospects of Narrative Hermeneutics i n Tumultuous Times
Hanna Meretoja andMarkFreeman
We live in a world that is increasingly defined by a contest of incommensurable narratives. This situation has emerged over a period of time shaped by the rise of populism, the increasing polarization of societies, what has been dubbed as “post-truth” politics, and, most recently, Russia’s war in Ukraine. The internet is replete with narratives that contest basic facts about climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the atrocities that Russia is currently committing in Ukraine. Yet those committed to truth and science should acknowledge that their relationship to the world is also narratively mediated. Both in our everyday lives and in scholarship we engage in acts of interpretation, and cultural narratives shape the ways in which we interpret reality. Acknowledging this is a precondition for critical engagement with these cultural narratives and for the ability to contribute to new narrative imaginaries that might help us work through some of our urgent global crises.
In the late twentieth century, the “interpretive turn” of the human sciences led to a wide acknowledgment of the centrality of interpretation for understanding human reality. It was recognized not only that all disciplines engage in acts of interpretation as they pose questions to and make sense of reality, but also that the human sciences engage in double hermeneutics in that they interpret human subjects who interpret their own experiences.1 Since then, intellectual fashions have changed, but interpretation has not lost its key role in our sense-making practices. Interpretation is an inevitable aspect of human existence, not only of our everyday lives
—our processes of understanding ourselves and others—but also of political debate and of the scholarly and scientific exploration of human reality. Given the centrality of interpretation for the human sciences, reflection and theory on this important phenomenon are surprisingly sparse in contemporary discussions. In the current era of incommensurable narratives, such reflection has gained new urgency. This volume shows the topicality and pertinence of the question of interpretation for current discussions in interdisciplinary narrative studies as well as for the broader political debate that revolves around issues of truth, facts, and narrative. Against the backdrop of these discussions, it explores both the dangers of narrative in the context of “post-truth” politics and new ways of addressing the inevitability of interpretation.
Dangers of Narrative and the Inevitability of Interpretation in the Era of “Post-Truth”
Politics
In relation to the “post-truth” era, this volume seeks to address some of the dangers associated with narrative interpretation. In the United States especially but also globally, people are bombarded with terms such as “fake news” and “alternative facts”; we live in a political reality undermined by what the Rand Corporation has referred to as “truth decay” (cited in Kakutani, 2018). So it is that, in recent years, we see titles such as “A Carnival of Disinformation: Republicans Warmly Welcomed Voters into Their Post-Truth Convention” (Coppins, 2020), “I’ve Been Lied About and Others Get Death Threats: Covid Has Shown the Power of Misinformation” (Srid har, 2021), “What It Really Means when Trump Calls a Story ‘Fake News’ ” (Sullivan, 2020), and “Ukraine: The Narrative the West Doesn’t Hear” (Gardner, 2022).
So it is, moreover, that narrative practice has at times come under attack due to its ostensible “accessory” role in the aforementioned process of truth decay. As Michiko Kakutani asks in her book The
Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump (2018), “How did this happen? What are the roots of falsehood in the Trump era? How did truth and reason become such endangered species, and what does their impending demise portend for our public discourse and the future of our politics and governance?” (p. 15) We might also add the following questions: What role has narrative interpretation played in this “impending demise”? What role might narrative theorists play in righting the current course, or at least providing some much-needed conceptual tools for thinking about it? It should be noted that, for Kakutani, we who study narrative interpretation and avow its inevitability would likely be seen as part of the problem. Distant though we may be from the postmodernist theory she bemoans, some of the ideas we advance are, or at least appear to be, uncomfortably close. If in fact narrative interpretation is as inevitable as many of us would claim, and if, moreover, we reject the idea of there being some Archimedean point from which to discern reality, how, it may be asked, can we avoid being accomplices to the subjectivizing, relativizing trends being bemoaned?
Important though elements of this line of criticism may be, our perspective on the matters at hand is that dismissing the centrality of interpretation makes us more, rather than less, vulnerable to these dangers. As scholars, we are inevitably part of the interpretive process through which we make sense of our objects of investigation. Sustained reflection on our ways of being implicated in the research process makes the process more rigorous. Moreover, the fact that it has become important to reveal blatant lies for what they are does not mean that the solution to “truth decay” is a simple return to “brute facts,” as some have suggested (see, e.g., D’Ancona, 2017; Kakutani, 2018; Macintyre, 2018). It is still important to acknowledge the interpretive aspects of politics that are at work even when the politicians aspire to truth—for example, in order to be able to analyze what kinds of relations of power different political narratives perpetuate or challenge. There are hence dangers in current attempts to dismiss the inevitability of interpretation, whether the dismissal is due to misgivings about the allegedly
relativistic or even nihilistic undercurrents of interpretivist frameworks, especially in their narrative form, or to the lingering positivism of cognitive science, linked to its scientific—and, at times, scientistic ambitions, that is, to the problematic idea of unmediated, direct, or “pure” experience that is simply there and involves no processes of interpretation. We therefore seek to show in the proposed volume not only why narrative hermeneutics is paramount for our understanding of human reality but also why it can serve as an important vehicle for redressing the dangers just identified.
While much of narrative scholarship has traditionally participated in the celebration of narrative, there has been increasing interest over the past few years in the problematic aspects of the current “storytelling boom” (for an overview, see Mäkelä & Meretoja, 2022). Particular attention has been paid to the ways in which the complicity of this boom with the neo-liberal focus on the upward mobility of hard-working and deserving individuals may distract us from social structures and processes (Fernandes, 2017). Moreover, narrative as a mode of sense-making does not easily lend itself to understanding such complex processes as climate change that lack a central subject of experience and involve a time span that goes beyond traditional human scale, experientially driven storytelling (Mäkelä et al., 2021, p. 155; Meretoja, 2018a, p. 106). Narratologically oriented approaches, in particular, which draw on the legacy of structuralism or cognitive science, tend to dismiss the interpretive dimension of narrative practices and the role narrative plays in making sense not only of the past but also of the future.2 In this volume, we suggest that narrative hermeneutics is a particularly productive approach to narrative precisely because it sees narrative as central to our interpretive engagement with the world, including the ways in which we imagine different possibilities individually and collectively.
Narrative Hermeneutics
“Hermeneutics” refers to the theory of interpretation. Its origins are in the study of texts that require particular interpretive efforts (such sacred and legal texts), but in its modern form it signifies theoretical and philosophical reflection on interpretation and understanding in general. It is thus no longer limited to text interpretation, nor is it committed to a particular conception of interpretation.3 Hermeneutic approaches to narrative also go far beyond theorizing the interpretation of written narratives. The twentieth-century tradition of philosophical hermeneutics emphasizes that the human mode of being in the world has an interpretive structure: we exist in the world with others by constantly interpreting and making sense of our experiences. As the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (2006, p. 25 0) puts it, we always see “something as something,” and Martin Heid egger (1927/1996) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960/1997) develop this view by foregrounding the historical situatedness of the ways in which we interpret our experiences and our being in the world. Paul Ricoeur (1983/1984), in turn, laid the foundations for narrative hermeneutics by arguing that narrative is fundamental to the human mode of making sense of experience in time.
While hermeneutics has been sometimes taken to imply the idea of searching for a hidden meaning waiting to be found in the depths of a text, the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics questions such an idea and emphasizes that the meaning of a text always takes shape in the dialogical encounter between the text and the reader (Gadamer, 1960/1997). Drawing on this tradition, Rita Felski (2015, p. 12) writes about interpretation as a process of “coproduction” in which the text and the reader jointly produce new meanings. As readers always interpret texts in new contexts, the process of interpretation is necessarily endless and can never arrive at a definitive, “ultimate” meaning.
The concept of narrative hermeneuticshas been developed as an explicit theoretical and philosophical approach to narrative in a range of contemporary approaches (e.g., Brockmeier 2015, 2016; Brockmei
er & Meretoja, 2014; Freeman, 2015; Meretoja, 2014, 2018a).
Narrative hermeneutics suggests that narrative is a cultural meaningmaking practice that is integral to how we make sense of who we are and who we could be. It also suggests that cultural webs of narratives are pivotal in shaping not only our conscious life but also our unconscious and our imagination. Hence, narrative hermeneutics considers narrative to be “not only an object of interpretation: narrative itself is amodeofinterpretation” (Meretoja, 2018a, p. 44). Since narrative provides interpretations of human experiences that already have an interpretive structure, narratives follow the logic of the aforementioned double hermeneutic, and, when we reinterpret our experiences in the light of cultural narratives, this involves the logic of a triple hermeneutic (p. 164).
Despite the broad impact of hermeneutics on understanding how we make sense of our lives and of the world through processes of narrative interpretation, its distinctiveness as an approach to narrative is rarely clear even to scholars of narrative. French structuralism shaped narratology, which saw narrative as a representation of a series of events (e.g., Genette, 1972; Rimmon-K enan, 2002) and left out any consideration of what the events mean for those who experience them. Hermeneutic approaches to narrative, in contrast, put the emphasis on the subject of experience and on why narrative matters to us as sense-making beings. Cognitive narratology also acknowledges that experientiality is crucial to narrativity (Fludernik, 1996; Herman, 2009), but it tends to have an ahistorical conception of experience and is not particularly interested in the existential dimension of narrative. What is distinctive of narrative hermeneutics, we suggest, is that it explores the significance of narrative for human existence: it envisages narratives as crucial for our sense of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going—to our “sense of the possible” (Meret oja, 2018a). It hence brings in the existential and ethical significance of narrative in ways that not only structuralist but also cognitive and other “postclassical” narratologies tend to dismiss. Moreover, unlike cognitive approaches, narrative hermeneutics emphasizes the temporal, culturally and historically mediated nature of experience.
Articulating the common ground and tensional relations between these traditions allows us to understand better the distinctiveness and topicality of narrative hermeneutics.
What is the contribution of hermeneutics to current narrative theory? What kinds of practices and ethics of interpreting narratives do hermeneutic approaches encourage? And, again, how might these approaches serve to address—and perhaps redress—some of the dangers considered earlier? Can narrative hermeneutics be of value in reimagining, and thereby holding onto, the idea of truth? The book situates hermeneutic approaches to narrative in the field of interdisciplinary narrative studies, maps the distinctiveness of narrative hermeneutics, and explores its philosophical underpinnings and relevance for topical discussions not only in narrative studies and other fields of the human sciences but also in providing conceptual tools to address issues of truth and interpretation in the current “post-truth” era. We started this book project when Donald Trump had just been elected as the US President, and we are finishing it when Vladimir Putin has launched his war on Ukraine. If anything, the issues discussed in this volume have become even more pertinent now that we see how false narratives (e.g. Putin’s blatantly false narrative of how Russia is “liberating” Ukraine from “Neo-Nazis”) can be weaponized in an effort to justify devastating loss of civilian lives and other war crimes. Indeed, given the kinds of claims advanced by the likes of Trump, Putin, and their acolytes, and given as well the sheer nihilism exemplified therein, it can plausibly be argued that retaining some workable conception of truth in narrative is nothing short of a necessity. As will become clear in the chapters to follow, narrative hermeneutics is a most appropriate candidate for doing exactly that.
The Structure of the Volume
The volume has four parts. The first, “Politics of Storytelling,” explores issues of narrative interpretation in the political context of the current debate on “post-truth” and addresses the need to
engage with the current anxieties about relativism and nihilism as well as the conceptual resources narrative hermeneutics provides for addressing the challenges that we face in the current era. This section includes Mark Freeman’s exploration of “The Inevitability, and Danger, of Narrative,” focusing especially on some of the problems currently being faced regarding “alternate facts,” “fake news,” and, more generally, what Michiko Kakutani (2018) has called “the death of truth”; Colin Davis’s chapter “Testimony: Truth, Lies, and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” which, in a related manner, shows that the inevitable entanglement of experience, storytelling, and interpretation need not lead to the abandonment of a commitment to speak the truth and underscores the political and ethical importance of addressing the post-truth era without delusion or cynicism; and Hanna Meretoja’s “Hermeneutic Awareness in Uncertain Times: Post-Truth, Narrative Agency, and Existential Diminishment,” in which she argues that, rather than opposing truth and narrative or a turning away from narratives and embracing a (putatively) fact-based orientation to truth, we need more nuanced understanding of the relationship between narrative and truth and, in turn, a more nuanced hermeneutic awareness of the interpretive processes and resources through which we make sense of the world. The second part of the volume, “Understanding the Self,” focuses on issues of interpretation in relation to self and personal identity and considers different traditions of theorizing the relationship between narrative and selfhood. Chapters include Jens Brockmeier’s “Verstehen and Narrative,” an examination of the relationship between narrative and verstehen (human understanding), with the latter conceived less as an intellectual or cognitive means of acquiring knowledge and more as an existential practice inherent in the human condition; Molly Andrews’s “Be Loyal to the Story: Sorrow, Narrative, and Truth-Telling,” which explores the connection between personal loss and story as well as the challenges that may arise when the interpretive frameworks developed and employed throughout our lives suffer violent rupture; Shaun Gallagher’s “Narrative as an Interpretation of Self-Pattern,” an examination of the “self-pattern,” the role of narrative practices in shaping this
pattern, and the hermeneutical role played by narrative in selfunderstanding as well as in how others come to see us; and “Speaking of Elves, Dragons, and Werewolves: Narrative Hermeneutics and Other-than-Human Identities,” by Clive Baldwin, Lauren Ripley, and Shania Arsenault, a provocative exploration of those individuals who, though human in appearance, identify as either a mythical or fantastical creature (e.g., an elf or werewolf) or an animal (e.g., a dog or bear) and who therefore challenge the customary alignment of others’ perceptions of who and what one is (a human, by all indications) and one’s experienced identity (as some Other-than being).
The third part of the volume, “Understanding the Other,” addresses broad issues regarding the challenge of understanding others as well as more specific issues regarding understanding those whose heinous actions challenge our interpretive and moral categories and commitments. Chapters include Georgia Warnke’s “Identity, Understanding, and Narrative,” which has as its main focus the hermeneutic legitimacy, or illegitimacy, of portrayals of historically marginalized people crafted by those outside of their own interpretive communities; Andreea Deciu Ritivoi’s “Found in Translation: Solicitude and Linguistic Hospitality in Storytelling,” which argues that the circulation of emotion through storytelling can be manipulative or abusive as much as liberating, that even the much vaunted notion of narrative empathy bears within it the possibility of misuse or abuse, and that, consequently, it behooves us to adopt interpretive practices more explicitly grounded in and guided by respect and justice; “The Hermeneutics of Darkness: Interpreting Perpetrators on Their Crimes,” by Brian Schiff, Kaylee Altimore, and Genevieve Bougher, an inquiry into the challenges and difficulties associated with understanding the perpetrators of atrocities, focusing on Gitta Serenyi’s Into That Darkness: An ExaminationofConscience(1983), which is based on interviews with Franz Stangl, former Commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp during the Holocaust; and, in a related vein, Roger Frie’s “Perpetrator Histories, Silencing and Untold Stories: A View from Contemporary Psychoanalysis,” which underscores the role
psychoanalysis can play in identifying the ways in which processes such as silencing, dissociation, and denial may be perpetuated through specific forms of interpretation and storytelling.
The fourth and final part of the volume, “Narrative Practices,” explores narrative hermeneutics in relation to practical pursuits ranging from the interpretation of literature and film all the way to contemporary medicine and psychiatry. Chapters in this section include Jakob Lothe’s “Literary and Film Narratives,” an in-depth analysis of three narratives (Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement [2001], Jo Wright’s film version of Atonement [2007], and Michael Haneke’s film Amour[2012]) that explore significant aspects of memory, selfunderstanding, and narrative identity; Ada Schwanck’s “Queer Perspectives on Narrative Practices in Asylum Politics,” which shows how Western hegemonic narratives and identity categories render women and queer asylum seekers vulnerable to intrusive questioning and deportation and also explores the potential of nonviolent narrative practices as an ethical and compassionate way of encountering asylum narratives; Danielle Spencer’s “Narrative Medicine: The Book at the Gates of Biomedicine,” an inquiry into those narrative practices that find their way into clinical care and thereby secure a place for narrative medicine within the heretofore “closed gates” of biomedicine; and Bradley Lewis’s “Psychiatric Truth and Narrative Hermeneutics,” which, not unlike Spencer’s chapter, seeks to secure a place with psychiatric practice, itself dominated by the biomedical approach, for those narrative practices that are not only relevant for but also intrinsic to the interpretation of self, identity, and difference. As Lewis goes on to argue, psychiatry is a fundamentally hermeneutic practice to which narrative interpretation is integral. And the same applies, we might add, to the other fields of practice addressed in this last part of the volume. When it comes to exploring the human realm, narrative hermeneutics is indeed unsurpassable; it is part and parcel of the very project of understanding the human world. Given this very unsurpassability, interpretive misuse and abuse may be virtually inevitable. This renders the substance of the present volume that much more urgent.
An Invitation to Dialogue
The work of the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (e.g., 1960/1997) is central to the project of narrative hermeneutics, and his perspective emphasizes the centrality of dialogue for this project: the dialogue that exists between interpreter and text and, equally important for the present volume, the dialogue that exists, or that might exist, between those different interpreters who come to the task of interpretation from what sometimes seem like entirely different worlds, entirely different universes of meaning. As we see all too clearly in the contemporary political world, this can lead to seemingly unbridgeable narrative impasses and, perhaps, the conviction that dialogue is all but impossible. Gadamer’s hermeneutics holds open the possibility that such impasses can in fact be bridged by true and mutual attention to the other.
Following Gadamer’s lead, this volume aims to show both how hermeneutics can contribute to topical debates in interdisciplinary narrative studies and how it might illuminate, and even redress, the current cultural and political situation in which issues of truth have gained new urgency. It therefore speaks to anyone who is interested in narrative as a crucial dimension of our contemporary reality and in the political relevance of the interpretive approach in the current world situation.
There is another dimension of dialogue we wish to underscore as well. Despite the interdisciplinarity of narrative studies, there has been no sustained effort to discuss the significance of the phenomenon of interpretation for the study of narrative across disciplines. By contributing to such discussion, we aim to bring narrative psychology and literary narrative studies into a more intense dialogue.4 We also hope to show the relevance of narrative hermeneutics to diverse fields ranging from narrative psychology, cultural studies, and narrative medicine to literary studies, philosophy, and other human sciences. Because narrative studies is a booming field and narrative itself has gained new urgency in our current social and political reality, there is a need for scholarship that
helps readers to navigate this field and make sense of both the ethical and political potential and the dangers of the use of narrative when it comes to the psychological, political, and social dimensions of our lives. This volume seeks to meet this need head-on. It cannot, and does not, seek to provide definitive answers or solutions to the questions and problems before us. Rather, in true Gadamerian fashion, it is an invitation to dialogue on those topics that are central both to current interdisciplinary narrative studies and, more broadly, to our contemporary narrative and political imagination.
Notes
1. On the interpretive turn, see Hiley, Bohman, and Shusterman, 1992; Rabinow and Sullivan, 1987; Meijer, 2023. On double hermeneutics, see Giddens, 197 6; Habermas, 1984.
2. In structuralist narratology, narrative is seen as a textual representation of a series of events; in cognitive narratology, narrative tends to be seen in terms of universal, ahistorical cognitive models.
3. For an overview, see Meretoja, 2018a, 2018b.
4. This volume complements Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities ofStorying Experience (Schiff, McKim, & Patron, 2017), which is similar to our book in crossing the divide between narrative psychology and literary narrative studies but does not focus on theorizing interpretation or issues of the “post-truth” era.
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PART I
POLITICS OF STORYTELLING
1
The Inevitability, and Danger, of Narrative
MarkFreeman
Introduction: What Have We Wrought?
The title of this chapter derives, in part, from a book written some time ago by Michiko Kakutani titled The Death of Truth: Notes on FalsehoodintheAgeofTrump (2018). Much of what Kakutani says in the book would be familiar territory to many readers. But there is one part of it that I found particularly provocative. And it has to do with the kinds of ideas some of us narrative hermeneutics types have been addressing through the years. Her primary target is what she refers to, borrowing a phrase from the Rand Corporation, as “truth decay.” “How,” she asks, “did this happen? What are the roots of falsehood in the Trump era? How did truth and reason become such endangered species, and what does their impending demise portend for our public discourse and the future of our politics and governance?” (p. 15). “With Trump,” she writes,
the personal is political, and in many respects he is less a comic-book anomaly than an extreme, bizarre-world apotheosis of many of the broader, intertwined attitudes undermining truth today, from the merging of news and politics with entertainment, to the toxic polarization that’s overtaken American politics, to the growing populist contempt for expertise. (pp. 16–17)
As for where these intertwining attitudes may have come from, she points to, among other places, “postmodernist theory,” including some of those specific variants of it that focus on narrative. “The migration of postmodern ideas from academia to the political mainstream,” Kakutani writes, “is a reminder of how the culture wars
