In his book To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip-Hop Aesthetic, William Jelani Cobb writes: "The telling of one's tale is a human rite. And in the end, we are simply the stories we tell" (137). Cobb is among many who believe that narrative--in this case, autobiography--defines who we are.
Narratives range from the simple and intimate ("I went home") to the complex and overarching (narrative archetypes, or master plots). The smaller micro-narratives can intersect or overlap; they can be bundled together to create master narratives. Narratives appear in our everyday conversations, in works of art, in politics, and in the news.
The play on "human rite/human right" should not go unremarked. The word "rite" implies repetition: ritual is often characterized as a repeated practice, and these repetitions give structure to our lives, often in the form of tradition. They are predictable, and that predictability is comforting. H. Porter Abbott writes that "we engage in narrative so often and with such unconscious ease that the gift for it would seem to be everyone's birthright" (1).
Abbott also draws a connection between narrative and memory, saying that it shows up in children around three or four years old, around the time they start putting subjects and verbs together linguistically. Lacan talks about the mirror stage--that point at which a toddler sees itself in the mirror and develops an image of itself, an image toward which it will strive for the rest of its life.
What about the mirror stage and the origins of language? Lacan writes that the mirror stage comes to an end when the I becomes social. Is language a prerequisite for that social? I've read some of "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," I think that might offer some answers to the question.
Narrative can be chronological, but does not have to be. Furthermore, it does not rely on clock time (although it may and often does): narrative allows "events themselves to create the order of time" (Abbott 4). Music, too, is very good at creating chronology independent of clock time: music can be fast or slow--more accurately, it can feel fast or slow, or anything in between. It can speed up or slow down, it can refer back to an earlier moment or foreshadow what's to come.
In future posts, I want to consider the "overcoming" narrative in terms of both disability and hypermasculinity; narratives of HIV and AIDS; ruptures in narratives and their consequences.
Narratives range from the simple and intimate ("I went home") to the complex and overarching (narrative archetypes, or master plots). The smaller micro-narratives can intersect or overlap; they can be bundled together to create master narratives. Narratives appear in our everyday conversations, in works of art, in politics, and in the news.
The play on "human rite/human right" should not go unremarked. The word "rite" implies repetition: ritual is often characterized as a repeated practice, and these repetitions give structure to our lives, often in the form of tradition. They are predictable, and that predictability is comforting. H. Porter Abbott writes that "we engage in narrative so often and with such unconscious ease that the gift for it would seem to be everyone's birthright" (1).
Abbott also draws a connection between narrative and memory, saying that it shows up in children around three or four years old, around the time they start putting subjects and verbs together linguistically. Lacan talks about the mirror stage--that point at which a toddler sees itself in the mirror and develops an image of itself, an image toward which it will strive for the rest of its life.
What about the mirror stage and the origins of language? Lacan writes that the mirror stage comes to an end when the I becomes social. Is language a prerequisite for that social? I've read some of "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," I think that might offer some answers to the question.
Narrative can be chronological, but does not have to be. Furthermore, it does not rely on clock time (although it may and often does): narrative allows "events themselves to create the order of time" (Abbott 4). Music, too, is very good at creating chronology independent of clock time: music can be fast or slow--more accurately, it can feel fast or slow, or anything in between. It can speed up or slow down, it can refer back to an earlier moment or foreshadow what's to come.
In future posts, I want to consider the "overcoming" narrative in terms of both disability and hypermasculinity; narratives of HIV and AIDS; ruptures in narratives and their consequences.