Storytelling

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

These two brief lines from Muriel Rukeyser's poem, “The Speed of Darkness,” offer a succinct affirmation of the significance of storytelling for any discipline of the arts, humanities, and natural and social sciences. In effect, the so-called narrative turn in scholarly inquiry invites researchers to recognize how their particular forms of discourse are ordered as narratives; that is, to think of all discourse as taking the form of a story. Rukeyser reminds us that the worlds we inhabit (perceptual, existential, phenomenal, imagined, virtual, etc.) can for many purposes be understood as being composed of stories. The idea that the universe is made of atoms is just one of those stories.

Within the social sciences, the literature of historical inquiry took an explicit narrative turn in the 1970s, with representative works including Louis Mink's appraisal of history and fiction as modes of comprehension. However, during the same period, historians such as Lawrence Stone referred to the revival of [Page 833]narrative as a new old history, thereby indicating the durability of storytelling in the historiography of Western societies. Other social scientists who added significant momentum to the narrative turn around this time include Richard Rorty, with his call to see the social sciences as continuous with literature; that is, as genres of storytelling that interpret other people to us and thus enlarge and deepen our sense of community with them. Donald Polkinghorne's book Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences, and Laurel Richardson's work on narrative and sociology were similarly generative.

Alasdair MacIntyre provides an ethical imperative for disciplined storytelling in his influential study in moral theory, After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory: “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ … Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things” (1984, p. 216). Some of the most powerful and practical examples of the relationship between ethics and storytelling can be found in the literature that deals with the place of storytelling and narrative structures in finding meaning in illness. For example, Arthur Frank's The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics examines the ways in which illness can be the beginning of a journey in which the teller calls others into a transformative narrative relationship: personal ethics become social ethics as the suffering individual brings others into caring relationships, which in turn draw attention to social structures and systems that might support such morally responsible relationships.

Some critics of narrative methods argue that sociologists should be story analysts rather than storytellers. For example, Paul Atkinson repudiates the narrative turn in the social sciences and argues that personal narratives, especially illness narratives, misconstrue the essential nature of narrative by substituting a therapeutic for a sociological view of the person. Responding to Atkinson and others, Arthur Bochner defends what he calls “narrative's virtues” and argues that critics who see narratives of suffering as privileged, romantic, and/or solipsistic cling to an idealized (and certainly contested) theory of social inquiry, a monolithic conception of ethnography, a masculine characterization of sociology, and an implicit resistance to the moral, political, existential, and therapeutic goals of deploying narrative methods in seeking deeper understandings of social problems and issues.

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