Narrative representation of causes

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 64, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 309-316

  Currie, Gregory ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34547708539     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-594X.2006.00208.x     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. A sophisticated version of this view is to be found in Noël Carroll, "On the Narrative Connection," in New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective, ed. Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman (SUNY, 2001). Carroll focuses on the idea of narrative connection, which he explicates in causal terms, rather than on the idea of narrative, for, he says, we may call something a narrative even though it contains things that are not "strictly narrative elements" (p. 21)
2. Yet narrative connection and narrative are closely connected on Carroll's view: "I suspect that when we call more large-scale discourses, such as histories or novels, narratives, we do so because they possess a large number of narrative connections or because the narrative connections they contain have special salience or a combination of both" (ibid.)
3. J. David Velleman, "Narrative Explanation," Philosophical Review 112 (2003): 1-25. The following quotations indicate the emphasis that Velleman gives to emotional projection in his account of our judgments about narrative: "a description of events qualifies as a story in virtue of its power to initiate and resolve an emotional sequence in the audience" (18); "A story therefore enables its audience to assimilate events, not to familiar patterns of how things happen, but rather to familiar patterns of how things feel" (19); "the audience of narrative history is subject to a projective error. Having made subjective sense of historical events, by arriving at a stable attitude toward them, the audience is liable to feel that it has made objective sense of them, by understanding how they came about. Having sorted out its feelings toward events, the audience mistakenly feels that it has sorted out the events themselves: it mistakes emotional closure for intellectual closure" (20)
4. L. B. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London: Macmillan, 1929)
5. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse (Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 30
6. See also H. Porter Abbott, Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. xi
7. Genette's definition has the additional disadvantage that it applies only to narratives in language. Barbara Herrnstein-Smith's definition - "verbal acts consisting of someone telling someone else that something happened" - is equally problematic; p. 228 in Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories" in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 229-232
8. Peter Lamarque, "On Not Expecting Too Much of Narrative," Mind and Language 17 (2004): 393-408
9. For a recent survey, see Gerald Prince, "Revisiting Narrativity," in Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext, ed. W. Grünzweig and A. Solbach (Tübingen: Gunter Narr., 1998)
10. "Narrativity" is a term used in different ways; other senses of "narrativity" include that of Greimas ("Elements of a Narrative Grammar," Diacritics [1977]: 23-40)
11. who uses it to name a level of autonomous meaning that survives translation between languages and even between media (see also Claude Bremond, "Le Message Narratif," Communications 4 [1964]: 4-32)
12. My use carries no implication that any such autonomous meaning exists. Galen Strawson uses "narrativity" to refer to a certain view of life as understood in terms of narrative; see his excellent and provocative "Against Narrativity," Ratio 17 (2004): 428-452, with which I have no quarrel here. Noël Carroll says that by distinguishing between narratives, annals, and chronicles we avoid the need for the concept of degree of narrativity (in something like my sense) (Carroll, "On the Narrative Connection," p. 34). But even if we reserve "narrative," as Carroll suggests we should, for items with significant, salient narrative connections, there is plenty of room left for judgments of degree, and hence for narrativity
13. In some other cases, the determinants of some higher-order property are not the things we are sensitive to in making judgments about that property. Mental states may supervene on behavioral dispositions, but we make, and are justified in making, attributions of mental states to ourselves without having to check to see whether we possess the relevant dispositions
14. See Gregory Currie and Jon Jureidini, "Narrative and Coherence," Mind and Language 19 (2004): 409-427
15. Herbert Butterfield, George III and the Historians (London: Macmillan, 1957), p. 206
16. Carroll's approach is, I think, somewhat different in that he urges us to see things as narratives to the extent that they "possess a large number of narrative connections or because the narrative connections they contain have special salience or a combination of both" ("On the Narrative Connection," p. 21). On this view, judgments about narrative do not really involve any graded concepts: they depend on our making a number of categorical judgments that identify certain elements of the discourse as narrative connections. Gradedness would enter Carroll's account at the point where we consider the relative importance and salience of the narrative connections
17. Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry, Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1993)
18. Stephen Hetherington, Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge: On Two Dogmas of Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2001)
19. See Nelson Goodman, "Twisted Tales: Story, Study and Symphony" in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (University of Chicago Press, 1981)
20. For some narratives, the intended effect is that we should suppose there to be some connection between events, but not that there should be any definite relation that we suppose to hold. Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973) achieves its effects partly by persuading us that there is or might be a connection between the death of the Baxters' child and the murders in Venice, but depends on leaving this connection unclear
21. David Lewis, "Postscripts to 'Causation,'" in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 176
22. David Lewis, "Causation as Influence," Journal of Philosophy 97 (2000): 182-197
23. Lewis's more recent theory is still fundamentally a counterfactual one; for criticisms of the counterfactual approach, see Peter Menzies, "Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Conceptions of Causation," in Causation and Laws of Nature, ed. H. Sankey (Boston: Kluwer, 1999), pp. 313-329
24. We do, it is true, recognize another sense of reasons: someone may have a normative reason for doing something that he or she may not act on and may not even know about (see Michael Smith, The Moral Problem [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1994], ch. 4). This sense is not relevant here because I am considering the situation where someone thinks that events in a narrative are connected in some way, and one possible way of thinking of them as connected is to think that an agent did, as a matter of fact, enact or otherwise bring one of them about, and the agent was motivated to do so partly by the belief that the other event had occurred. It would not be a way of thinking of the events as narratively connected merely to think that one of them provided a reason for the agent to bring the other about, though he or she in fact did not do so - unless you also thought of them as connected as reasons in the sense explained in the next paragraph of text above
25. M. R. James, "The Mezzotint" in Collected Ghost Stories (London: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 46-55
26. The existence of such pathways is suggested even in ghost stories where there are supernatural agents. Another story by James, "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad" (Collected Ghost Stories) has a hapless academic holidaying in East Anglia summon a supernatural agent (though not a very powerful one) by blowing on an ancient whistle that he finds. The causal pathway from the blowing to the arrival of the agent is one of these magically meaning-preserving ones, but that part of the causal process is not, I think, mediated by the activity of any other supernatural being
27. On the role of frameworks in narrative, see my "Framing Narratives," in Narratives and Persons, ed. D. Hutto (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
28. C. Nemeroff, "Magical Thinking about Illness Virulence: Conceptions of Germs from 'Safe' Versus 'Dangerous' Others," Health Psychology 14 (1995): 147-151
29. To repeat an earlier point, I cannot, of course, be sure that these results do not reflect subjects' views about the involvement of agency; perhaps it can be shown that people think of germs themselves as agents and believe or imagine that the germs of loved ones are more benignly intentioned. If this were shown, it would not alter the fundamental point: narrativity judgments depend on our perception (including our misperception) of relations of dependence of some kind between the events described