Some assorted thoughts on narrative:
- Narratives of “overcoming” pervade our conversations about disability: a disability is something that must be overcome, such that the disabled person can be a member of “normal” society. These narratives make us feel good, particularly in cases of spectacular overcoming: Beethoven overcame his deafness to become one of the greatest composers of western classical music, for instance. Or recall the story of Oscar Pistorious, the South African runner who competed in the Olympics on two prosthetic legs (leaving aside his subsequent murder trial).
- Narratives of overcoming also pervade hip hop. On the one hand, disability is not what’s overcome here; rather, it’s the vestiges of slavery, Jim Crow, the War on Drugs, and mass incarceration. Cobb highlights the “Malcolm X formula” that underlies many rap autobiographies: birth-dissolution of family-experience of poverty-hustling-incarceration-redemption. Rappers like Jay-Z, Eminem, and 50 Cent have built their careers on this overcoming narrative.
- The "overcoming" narrative could be seen as a kind of "masterplot": there are many, many variations on this one theme that have been passed down from generation to generation, and new versions continue to emerge. Such masterplots are important not only because they provide us with a way to group similar stories, but they also reveal to us something about our cultural values. This I think is an important point to keep in mind in this particular project, given that many of the crises I've had in mind deal with politicized subjects like AIDS and race relations. How we talk about AIDS, or the queer community, or the black community tells us a lot about how we--perhaps subconsciously or unknowingly--perceive them. Their narratives tell us a lot about how they view themselves. The conflicts between these narratives (say, between the mainstream media's narratives about black men vs. the narratives about black men in rap music, or the narratives in mainstream US media about 9/11 vs. the narratives in foreign media) are also revealing.
- Building on the work of C.M. Parkes, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman talks about "the assumptive world": we exist in a world that is largely predictable as a result of our repeated interactions with it. The sun comes up every morning, we eat breakfast, we go to work, etc. Repetition is related to predictability, and predictability leads to security. This repetition--the assumptive world--is a narrative: it is the stories we tell.
- A traumatic event is one that overwhelms our body's (and mind's) ability to adapt. Trauma theorists beginning with Freud and others, have remarked on the importance of the element of surprise in understanding traumatic events. Traumatic events are often described as "a moment out of time." If our interactions with the world are structured by narrative, and narrative arranges events in time, a traumatic event is a disruption in our narrative(s). The even could disrupt our own personal narrative, it could rupture community narratives, or narratives on the largest of scales (i.e., 9/11 I would say was a rupture in the narrative of American history and culture, and--of course--its consequences were felt around the world).
- Traumatic memories are non-narrative: they are intrusive, and occur at random. They are often unconscious memories (which is to say they appear as dreams). Part of the task of recovery involves integrating the traumatic memory into one's personal narrative; to do so imposes a kind of narrative on the otherwise non-narrative traumatic memory: Freud writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: "He [the victim] is obliged rather to repeat as a current experience what is repressed, instead of, as the physician would prefer to see him do, recollecting it as a fragment of the past."