Literature and the narrative self

Philosophy

Volumn 78, Issue 303, 2003, Pages 93-108

  Vice, Samantha ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF READING   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 33846333215     PISSN: 00318191     EISSN: 1469817X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0031819103000068     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. I am grateful to John Cottingham, Galen Strawson, Bart Streumer and Douglas Farland for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper
2. In what follows, I will use 'self' and 'identity' interchangeably to capture 'who we are'
3. Jerome Bruner, 'Life as Narrative', Social Research 54, No. 1 (1987), 31
4. Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 47
5. Marya Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 94
6. Bruner, 'Life as Narrative', 12
7. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Allen Lane, 1992), Chapter 13
8. Taylor, The Sources of the Self, 51
9. The account below is taken from Robert C. Roberts, 'Narrative Ethics', A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (eds.) (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997), 474
10. On history and narrative, see Hayden White, 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality', On Narrativity, W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981)
11. So called by Galen Strawson in 'Against Narrative' (unpublished manuscript)
12. Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves, 114
13. See Galen Strawson, 'The Self', Journal of Consciousness Studies 4, Nos. 5-6 (1997), 405-28
14. Quoted in Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 115-6
15. Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue, (London: Duckworth, 1982), 200
16. Bruner, 'Life as Narrative', p. 15
17. See Bruner, Acts of Meaning, 120-1
18. and Maclntyre, After Virtue, 196-7
19. Paul Seabright, 'The Pursuit of Unhappiness: Paradoxical Motivation and the Subversion of Character in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady', Ethics 98 (1988), 330
20. On this, see Seabright, op. cit. and in a different context, Bernard Williams, 'Utilitarianism and Moral Self-Indulgence', Contemporary British Philosophers, H. D. Lewis (ed.) (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1976)
21. Amélie Rorty, 'A Literary Postscript: Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals', The Identities of Persons, Amelie Rorty (ed.) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 304
22. The weakness in John Irving is, perhaps, that his casts tend to contain Characters, not persons
23. I owe this point to John Cottingham
24. Iris Murdoch, 'Against Dryness', Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, Peter Conradi (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 294
25. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 96-7
26. At times, Murdoch sounds as if she would agree with the narrative conception of the self. Her well-known remark in 'Metaphysics and Ethics' (Existentialists and Mystics, op. cit., 75) that '[m]an is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture' sounds like Bruner's claim that a narrative structure is imposed on our world
27. Similarly, in an interview with Bryan Magee, she says, '[w]hen we return home and 'tell our day', we are artfully shaping material into story form.... So in a way as word-users we all exist in a literary atmosphere, we live and breathe literature, we are all literary artists, we are constantly employing language to make interesting form out of experience which perhaps originally seem dull or incoherent' ('Literature and Philosophy', Existentialists and Mystics, op. cit., 6-7). Read carefully, however, and bearing in mind her extensive discussions on the tension between form and contingency in the novel, I believe she would not advocate what I have called the strong narrative view, but would be persuaded by the arguments I put forward in this section
28. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 87
29. Maria Antonaccio, 'Form and Contingency in Iris Murdoch's Ethics', Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (eds.) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Antonaccio's perceptive paper has been helpful in understanding Murdoch's concerns and in constructing the arguments of this paper