Claiming the Right to Say No-30 Nov 09-EQUATIONS - Equitable ...

Claiming the Right to Say No
experience. This attention to the narrative structure of our experience
allows us to understand how a society collectively attempts to organize
itself. The study of narrative has a long history with significant
developments in recent times. In literature, we can trace the work of
Wayne Booth and Kenneth Burke, Robert Scholes, Robert Kellog, Frank
Kermode. The French structuralist literary theory also featured a strong
emphasis on the narratives. Basing their work on eastern European
linguists, such as Vladimir Propp and Roman Jakobson, French scholars
like Roland Barthes, A.J Greimas and Claude Bremond, have produced
significant studies of narrative structure. The work of Hayden White
attempted to demonstrate the narrative character of history. Thus, the
analysis of the narrative that centred on the literature and structuralism
embraced history and demonstrated that we are bound by culturally
shaped rules that guide our ‘story-telling’. These rules provide narrative
coherence and let us think that there is a natural relationship between the
narrative and the real world. But, to attribute narrative coherence to real
events is, according to some scholars, wishful thinking at its best. Thus
the narrative is incapable of capturing and representing the world. That is
why, Paul Ricoeur teaches that narrative opens us to ‘the realm of the ‘as
if’. This means narrative introduces something new, and what it introduces
is a synthesis of the heterogeneous. It re-describes the world. Thus,
narrativization dresses up reality, to put across a moral view of the world
in the interest of power and manipulation.
The fact that there is a distance between the real world and the narrative
should not make us think that there is no link between narrative and our
daily life. Indeed narrative arises out of and is pre-figured in certain
features of life, action and communication and are successfully ordained
to control, manipulate and order human experience.
Enthusiastic Narrativists contend that we receive our identity as persons
and derive the content of our obligations, rights and responsibilities from
the narratives embraced by our communities. This view might be greeted
as narrativist imperialism yet the place, the power and the importance of
narrative cannot be brushed aside as it forms the character-and- conduct-
2