narrative reflections — after after virtue

8132019 Narrative reflections mdash After After Virtue

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullnarrative-reflections-after-after-virtue 19

Narrative Inquiry 983090983089983090 (983090983088983089983089) 983091983093983096ndash983091983094983094 983140983151983145 983089983088983089983088983095983093ni983090983089983090983089983093hol

983145983155983155983150 983089983091983096983095ndash983094983095983092983088 983141-983145983155983155983150 983089983093983094983097ndash983097983097983091983093 copy John Benjamins Publishing Company

Narrative reflections mdash Afer Afer Virtue

Michael HolquistYale University

Alasdair MacIntyre played a large role in alerting those outside literature de-

partments to the central role of narrative in very aspect of experience In this

he shares certain assumptions with Bakhtin Both argue that we cannot think

without putting events mdash especially the ongoing event of our lives mdash into a se-

quence of some kind Bakhtin differs from MacIntyre in recognizing that there is

a problem in thus universalizing narrative If everything is narrativized how can

we discriminate between good and bad stories Bakhtinrsquos concept of lsquonovelnessrsquo

is a general theory of narrative not just a theory of the genre of the novel Novel-

ness stresses the importance of openness shared authorship and other features

that provide a set of categories for distinguishing between stories that are faithful

to the dialogic nature of human existence and those that seek to deny that naturethrough various strategies that insure premature closure in a false unity In an

age when the Humanities are little valued by society at large the in depth knowl-

edge of narrative that defines the textual humanities can provide help to other

disciplines that are only now beginning to sense the importance of story

Keywords narrative dialogism crisis of the humanities Alasdair MacIntyre

Mikhail Bakhtin

Since the publication of Afer Virtue (1981) and Actual Minds Possible Worlds

(1986) the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Jerome Bruner has continued to find

new readers mdash and a new importance never greater than at the present moment

By lsquopresent momentrsquo I aver to the current flight of students administrators and

capital from the Humanities I will not rehearse the lugubrious statistics Suffice

it only to mention that the more higher education has expanded in the United

States since 1970 ldquothe more the liberal arts sector has shrunk in proportion to the

wholerdquo Menand p 201) Te decline has been particularly steep in what might be

Requests for further information should be directed to Michael Holquist 445 FDR Drive Apt

B-1704 New York New York 10002 Email MichaelHolquistyaleedu



Narrative reflections mdash Aer Afer Virtue 983091983093983097

called the textual humanities English history philosophy and foreign languages

disciplines devoted to interpreting the role of human language in human affairs

Tis numerical decrease has been matched or exceeded by an even greaterslump in the ideological prestige of the Humanities While there are many reasons

behind so historic a turn one stands out as decisive a loss of legitimacy It is not

simply that they are widely perceived as useless Collecting butterflies as a hobby

is useless (unless you are Vladimir Nabokov) but that fact does not lead non-am-

ateur lepidopterists to be held in suspicion by the general public Catching butter-

flies for fun continues to be regarded as legitimate because the claims it makes for

itself mdash itrsquos only a hobby mdash have not been called into question But the academic

study of literature is now widely perceived as not only useless but fraudulent in

the claims it has historically made for its reason to exist When in the late nine-

teenth early twentieth century reading modern literature ceased to be a hobby

and became an academic profession it had like other disciplines with which it

now began to compete to justify its claims for institutional support mdash budget of-

fices respect parking space mdash on the basis of what it had to offer in return

Definitions of the value it exclusively had to offer changed over time from

Mathew Arnoldrsquos argument in his 1880 essay ldquoTe Study of Poetryrdquo that ldquoTe fu-

ture of poetry is immensehellipbecause the strongest part of our religion today is its

unconscious poetryrdquo to more recent defenses based on claims for the cultural andpolitical relevance of literature As is all too obvious to everyone inside and outside

the professional study of literature none of these rationalizations has succeeded in

blunting the perception that such study is irrelevant in todayrsquos world

I believe MacIntyre and Bruner mdash while pursuing quite different topics from

distinct points of view mdash both identified a more compelling justification not only

for the validity of the textual humanities than had previously been advanced but

in so doing articulated reasons why the humanities should be included in all fu-

ture curricula For reasons of economy in pursuing this line I will concentrate on

Alisdair MacIntyrersquos chapter in Afer Virtue entitled ldquoTe Virtues the Unity of a

Human Life and the Concept of a raditionrdquo (MacIntyre pp 204ndash225)

In that essay MacIntyre establishes a crucial difference between a mere action

and an intelligible action (p 209) Te point he makes is that actions conceived

outside any context make no sense He illustrates this point with an anecdote in

which a young man standing next to him while waiting for a bus suddenly an-

nounces that ldquoTe name of the common wild duck is Histrionicus histrionicus his-

trionicusrdquo Tis utterance makes no sense unless we are able to embed it into some

kind of a context such as perhaps he is a spy waiting at a pre-arranged rendezvouswho mistakes MacIntyre for his contact and utters the information about ducks

as a code that will identify him Tere are many other ways to embed the young

manrsquos seemingly nonsensical sentence into a pattern that renders it meaningful



983091983094983088 Michael Holquist

Te point being ldquoIn each case the act of utterance becomes intelligible by finding

its place in a narrativerdquo (p 209)

MacIntyrersquos larger argument is that each of us is at the center of constant ac-tion all our lives we become who we are through the ceaseless manufacture of hi-

erarchically arranged contexts mdash stories Teir linkage mdash the story containing the

other stories mdash creates the unity of our life history in such a way that we achieve

an identity ldquoNarrative is not the work of poets dramatists and novelists reflecting

upon events which had no narrative order before one was imposed by the singer

or writer narrative form is neither a disguise nor decorationrdquo (p 211) What hersquos

arguing is that we are all mdash and necessarily mdash the authors of our lives

It has not gone unremarked that in this he closely parallels arguments found

in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (see Rankin Felch) In what follows Irsquod like to

argue that while there are uncanny filiations between both thinkers mdash not least

their shared concern for the ethical implications of what kind of stories we choose

to tell mdash it may well be that the differences between them are more germane to

arguments not merely for the ldquorelevancerdquo of the humanities but for the central role

they should play in education

In what was arguably Bakhtinrsquos most creative period mdash the years between the

October Revolution and his arrest in 1929 mdash he ceaselessly meditated the myster-

ies of authorship1 as they are present in art and in life His profoundest treatmentof these issues is found in the long unfinished work published in English un-

der the awkward (and somewhat misleading) title ldquoAuthor and Hero in Aesthetic

Activityrdquo

In ldquoArt and Answerabilityrdquo (1919 his first publication see Bakhtin 1990

pp 1ndash3) the highly condensed statement of the major ideas examined in the lon-

ger work Bakhtin as does MacIntyre examines the central place of narrative in

both life and fiction MacIntyre dwells on the difference between brute unassimi-

lated action and ldquointelligible actionrdquo events that have been endowed with mean-

ing through the place they occupy in a teleologically organized narrative Bakhtin

makes something like the same distinction when he contrasts merely lsquomechanical

elementsrsquo that are lsquonot imbued with the internal unity of meaning [smyslrsquo ]rdquo with

the power of individual persons to integrate such elements into their own unityrdquo

(p 1)

In both Bakhtin and MacIntyre the capacity to order the mindless flux of quo-

tidian events through narrative is explained as the result of narrativersquos necessary role

in cognition we perceive the world through the mechanism of story And both in-

sist on the further necessity of such stories being shared with others MacIntyre em-phasizes this social dimension when he says ldquoI am part of [othersrsquo stories] as they

are part of mine Te narrative of any life is part of an interlocking set of narrativesrdquo

(p 218) And Bakhtinrsquos whole life and work was devoted to better understanding self




and other as the dialog of dialogs in Dialogism ldquoIt is only when my life is set forth

for another that I myself become its herohelliprdquo (Bakhtin 1990 p 24)

Because the selfother distinction is then fundamental to narrative as it isconceived by both McIntyre and Bakhtin there is an ineluctably ethical dimen-

sion in the emphasis both put on the shared basis of narrative But the specific

way in which this moral turn is articulated in MacIntyre and Bakhtin diverges

Te source of this difference I suspect lies in the contrasting role that language

plays in each Whether in our heads or on the page both assume a story unfolds

only in the medium of words But MacIntyre devotes comparatively little attention

to the mechanics of utterance that narrative requires for its articulation whereas

for Bakhtin language is the ons et origo of dialog and thus of narrative Bakhtinrsquos

unique combination of post-Kantian assumptions about the nature of perception

combined with his later immersion in the subtleties of utterance in dialog result in

what he calls ldquometalinguisticsrdquo Tis conception of language is grounded in techni-

cal linguistics but not confined by the limits of that disciplinersquos conception of its

subject matter As Bakhtin says so well ldquoin addition to the forms of language there

exist as well combinations o these orms or what he calls ldquospeech genresrdquo (Bakhtin

1987 p 211)

I emphasize this difference between Bakhtin and MacIntyre because it seems

to me that the formerrsquos dialogic approach contains principles that could usefullybe brought into current debates about the assumed uselessness of the humanities

in education For all his neo-Aristotelian concern for virtue MacIntyre it could

be argued proposes a version of narrative that lacks a key element in any ethics

by stressing the universality of narrative to formation of human identity he fails to

provide specific criteria for adjudicating between what is a good or bad narrative

It should immediately be added that MacIntyrersquos primary goal is other He seeks

not to make a contribution to the study of narrative as such he is rather intent to

define what virtue might be in the post enlightenment the relation of moral phi-

losophy to religion and other questions that define him as a particularly thought-

ful and far-ranging thinker within the disciplinary bounds of modern academic

philosophy

Bakhtin on the other hand is famously difficult to classify by discipline as

he was to admit somewhat ruefully late in life ldquoOur analysis must be called philo-

sophical mainly because of what it is not It is not linguistic philological literary

or any other special kind of analysishelliprdquo (Bakhtin 1986 p 201) Te very difficulty

of classifying him with a disciplinary label is itself an index of just how Bakhtinian

Bakhtin was For he was dedicated not just to dialog as a phenomenon of lan-guage or literature but to dialog as a fundamental principle of all aspects of human

life What this entails among other things is a set of guidelines for distinguish-

ing between good and bad narratives and mdash implicitlly mdash a suggestion of what a




foundational ethics might look like extending to politics among other aspects of

everyday life2

Much commentary on Bakhtin has emphasized the willed opposition to rigidsystem in his poetics He oen advances his argument by aperccedilu rather than syl-

logism Recognition of this proclivity should not however obscure a correspond-

ing drive to arrange topics that recur in his work into classificatory lists of various

kinds Tis tendency derives from his recognition that discourse is fundamen-

tally polar constantly at play between centripetal forces that serve to ldquounify and

centralize the verbal-ideological worldrdquo (p 270) and those centrifugal forces that

stratify any unitary language into dialects technical glossaries class usages etc mdash

the roiling diversity that he calls lsquoheteroglossiarsquo (p 272)

Genre for Bakhtin is among the more powerful of the centripetal guards

against discursive chaos among which he famously assigns priority to the genre

of the novel ldquoTe novel is not merely one genre among other genresrdquo (Bakhtin

1981 p 4) When Bakhtin talks about ldquonovelnessrdquo as a category and lsquonovelizedrsquo as

a transitive verb he obviously understands the novel as something greater than

than can be contained by mere literary taxonomy (Bakhtin 1981 p 7) While this

aspect of his work is widely recognized (how could it not be) what follows from

such a recognition has not always been clear Te argument Irsquom making is that the

uniquness of the novel consists in the kind of specifically narrative possibilitiesthat it opens in the history of literature and the mechanics of forming a unified self

(as understood by MacIntyre)

It does so because first it has the capability to embody relations between dif-

ferent languages and secondly because in order to do this in any depth it had to

commit itself not only to diversity but to an unfinished openess

A chief characteristic of novelness is its foundation in an ldquoopen galilean world

of many languages mutually illuminating each otherrdquo (Bakhtin 1981 p 65) It

manifests not only different national languages mdash as olstoy uses French and Rus-

sian in War and Peace mdash but subtle differences in the socially determined dis-

course of speakers within a single national language Bakhtinrsquos example being the

pronunciation of the newly appropriated western word lsquoprinciplerdquo in the russian

19th century with older aristocrats preferring the so French consonant (lsquoprin-

siprsquo) and younger radicals preferring the more Germanic scientific sounding hard

consonant (lsquoprintsiprsquo)

All of this is well known What I wish to stress is that if Bakhtinrsquos definition

of novelness as a particularly vivid way of perceiving not only differences between

languages and genres but mdash more significantly mdash the relations between thosedifferences Bakhtinian lsquonovelnessrsquo is not merely another theory of the novel It is

a theory of narrative as such




Te novel is defined by Bakhtin as essentially a cognitive instrument a kind

of optic that permits us to see with particular clarity the fundamental relation

between language and story In dialogism human subjects are understood aswalking talking towers of Babel Each contains many languages at sevral differ-

ent levels languages that are appropriate to specific situations defined by custom

law class culture etc Te fiction of a national language is a comprehensive term

by which we synthesize polyglossia a particular range of discourses Differences

between national languages heteroglossia open up even further possibilities of

discursive relations

Poly- and hetero-glossia are terms that emphasize variety difference and

therefore mandate that individual subjects be able to make sense out of such roil-

ing diversity How do we select from and arrange for interpretation the particular

language appropriate to this particular situation MacIntyrersquos latent Aristotelian-

ism causes him to conceive of narrative as an overwhelmingly unifying mecha-

nism with a beginning middle and end as in Te Poetics3 (Aristotle p 1462 (II

7) Bakhtinrsquos early immersion in Kant impels him to conceive synthesis (Kant

1998 p 210 [A 77 B 103]) as the means by which such wildly diverging signals can

be translated into an ordered perception but one that is not so much a unity as it is

a dialog Like Kantrsquos synthesis Bakhtinrsquos dialog names a relation that is organized

less as a static oneness than as a tensile pattern of relationsConceiving novlelness as a theory of narative then brings into play criteria

for distinguishing between good and bad stories As a theory ultimately based on

perception it prizes stories that most challenge our capacity to synthesize in our

minds the greatest diversity of stimulation from the environment Tese stories are

first of all valuable because they accurately reflect the reality of the worldrsquos diver-

sity as opposed to stories that presuppose an already existing oneness in the world

Bakhtin expands on this distinction as a gap between discourse that is innerly per-

suasive and discourse that seeks to be authoritative (Bakhtin 1981 p 345)

Bakhtin provides a poetics of both forms of discourse because being able to

choose between them is at the heart of our ability to interpret the world with any

accuracy In a key formulation (where ldquoidologicalrsquo is the locution he uses for lsquocog-

nitiversquo) he says

ldquoTe topic of the speaking person takes on quite another signifikance in the or-

dinary ideological workings of our consciousness in the process of assimilating

our consciousness to the ideological world Te ideological becoming of a human

being in this view is the proces of selectively assimilating the words of othersrdquo

(Bakhtin 1981 p 341)

A more detailed version of the dynamics involved in such assimilation is provided

in Bakhtinrsquos account of the differences between offical (monlingual) and unofficial




(dialogic) discourses (Bakhtin 1981 pp 340ndash355)but Irsquod like to conclude this

short paper by returning to the larger problem I began with the utility Bakhtinrsquos

vision of narrative in current attempts to defend the place of the humanities inuniversity education

It is increasingly recognized across many disciplines that there is a narrative

core to our thinking Psychiatry has been invested in stories since at least Freud

Te importance of narrative is increasingly recognized across many areas from

legal studies (Brooks and Gewirtz 1996)4 to medicine Columbia Medical School

for instance has a whole program in ldquoNarrative Medicinerdquo that grants degrees

in the subject and includes some of the most distinguished faculty of the Col-

lege of Physicians and Surgeons Narrative is being taught in economics (Rodrik

2011) and even in business (Denning 2005) precisely in those areas outside the

Humanities that would seem to be most hard-headedly devoted to the real world

application of their training Tis recognition has done littel to stem the growing

suspicion that the Humanities are useless because what they teach has no utility in

the world outside the academy

I believe that Bakhtinian narratology constitutes one of the strongest argu-

ments against this prejudice As knowledge of the neccessary link between nar-

rative and thinking grows so will recognition of the consequent importance of

narrative It will be more important than ever for all students to have an educationthat sharpens perception of what makes good or bad stories Te argument of

this short paper has been that dialogism provides the most effective barometer for

measuring the worth of stories yet devised Its power consists in its ability com-

bine two senses of lsquogoodrsquo Its criteria are based on two fundamentals of what good

means Bakhtin lays out the properties that make stories good because they are

effective in achieving their aim and he also provides categories for judging a nar-

rative to be good on ethical (potentially political) grounds

Novelness defines a good narrative as that one which which not merely is

sensitive to and uncovers the multiplicity of languages in a cultural world or the

speech diversity within a particular national language Te best narrative is the

one that best understands linguistic diversity and can reveal the potential for new

understanding in such diversity Tat is a technical criterion But within it is a

profound ethical imperative

ldquowe must learn how to develop a sensitivity toward the brute materiality the typi-

cality that is the essential attribute not only of actions gestures and separate word

and expresssion but the basic ingredient in points of view in how the world is

seen and felt ways that are organically part ad parcel with the language that ex-

presses themrdquo (Discourse p 367)




Te fact that we increasingly inhabit a global commnity has lost some of its force

by having become a mindless cliche But it also happens to be the case We need

the skills the human sciences have honed over millennia more than ever in ourheteroglot world

Notes

983089 Authorship is a key element in MacIntyrersquos argument as well ldquoWhat I have called a history

is an enacted dramatic narrative in which the characters are also the authorshellipTe difference

between imaginary characters and real ones is not in the narrative form of what they do it is in

the degree of their authorship of that form and of their own deedsrdquo983090 Tis is the most accessible Bakhtinian text illustrating the relation between differed narrative

systems embodying different value systems

983091 Tis anthology contains such major figures (including the editors) as Alan Dershowitz Janet

Malcolm and Catherine MacKinnon among others

Reerences

Aristotle (2000) Poetics In R McKeon (Ed) Te basic works o Aristotle rans by I Bywater

New York Te Modern Library

Arnold M (2011) httparnoldclassicauthorsnetStudyOfPoetry (accessed October 8 2011)

Bakhtin M (1990) Art and answerability Early philosophical essays by M M Bakhtin (pp 4ndash256)

(2nd Ed) rans by V Liapunov Austin University of exas Press

Bakhtin M (1987) Te problem of speech genres In Speech genres and other late essays rans

by VW McGee Austin University of exas Press

Bakhtin M (1987) Te problem of the text in linguistics philology and the human sciences An

experiment in philosophical analysisrdquo In Speech genres and other late essays (p 103) rans

by VW McGee Austin University of exas PressBakhtin M (1981) Discourse in the novel In Te dialogic imagination (pp 259ndash452) rans by

C Emerson amp M Holquist Austin University of exas Press

Brooks P amp Gewirt P (1996) Lawrsquos stories Narrative and rhetoric in the Law New Haven Yale

University Press

Denning S (2005) Te leaderrsquos guide to story telling Mastering the art o business narrative New

York John Wiley

Felch SM (2005) In the chorus of othersrsquo M M Bakhtinrsquos sense of tradition In D G Marshall

(Ed) Te orce o tradition Response and resistance in literature religion and cultural stud-

ies (pp 55ndash78) Oxford Rowman and Littlefield

Kant I (1998) Critique o pure reason rans by P Guyer amp A Wood Cambridge CambridgeUniversity Press

MacIntyre A (1984) Afer virtue A study in moral theory (2nd edition) Notre Dame IN Uni-

versity of Notre Dame University Press




Menand L (2010) Te marketplace o ideas New York W W Norton

Rankin J (2002) What is narrative Ricoeur Bakhtin and process approaches in concresence

Te Australasian Journal o Process Tought 3 1ndash12

Rodrik D (2011) In search o prosperity Analytic narratives on economic growth D Rodrik edPrinceton Princeton University Press




called the textual humanities English history philosophy and foreign languages

disciplines devoted to interpreting the role of human language in human affairs

Tis numerical decrease has been matched or exceeded by an even greaterslump in the ideological prestige of the Humanities While there are many reasons

behind so historic a turn one stands out as decisive a loss of legitimacy It is not

simply that they are widely perceived as useless Collecting butterflies as a hobby

is useless (unless you are Vladimir Nabokov) but that fact does not lead non-am-

ateur lepidopterists to be held in suspicion by the general public Catching butter-

flies for fun continues to be regarded as legitimate because the claims it makes for

itself mdash itrsquos only a hobby mdash have not been called into question But the academic

study of literature is now widely perceived as not only useless but fraudulent in

the claims it has historically made for its reason to exist When in the late nine-

teenth early twentieth century reading modern literature ceased to be a hobby

and became an academic profession it had like other disciplines with which it

now began to compete to justify its claims for institutional support mdash budget of-

fices respect parking space mdash on the basis of what it had to offer in return

Definitions of the value it exclusively had to offer changed over time from

Mathew Arnoldrsquos argument in his 1880 essay ldquoTe Study of Poetryrdquo that ldquoTe fu-

ture of poetry is immensehellipbecause the strongest part of our religion today is its

unconscious poetryrdquo to more recent defenses based on claims for the cultural andpolitical relevance of literature As is all too obvious to everyone inside and outside

the professional study of literature none of these rationalizations has succeeded in

blunting the perception that such study is irrelevant in todayrsquos world

I believe MacIntyre and Bruner mdash while pursuing quite different topics from

distinct points of view mdash both identified a more compelling justification not only

for the validity of the textual humanities than had previously been advanced but

in so doing articulated reasons why the humanities should be included in all fu-

ture curricula For reasons of economy in pursuing this line I will concentrate on

Alisdair MacIntyrersquos chapter in Afer Virtue entitled ldquoTe Virtues the Unity of a

Human Life and the Concept of a raditionrdquo (MacIntyre pp 204ndash225)

In that essay MacIntyre establishes a crucial difference between a mere action

and an intelligible action (p 209) Te point he makes is that actions conceived

outside any context make no sense He illustrates this point with an anecdote in

which a young man standing next to him while waiting for a bus suddenly an-

nounces that ldquoTe name of the common wild duck is Histrionicus histrionicus his-

trionicusrdquo Tis utterance makes no sense unless we are able to embed it into some

kind of a context such as perhaps he is a spy waiting at a pre-arranged rendezvouswho mistakes MacIntyre for his contact and utters the information about ducks

as a code that will identify him Tere are many other ways to embed the young

manrsquos seemingly nonsensical sentence into a pattern that renders it meaningful
























Activityrdquo










(p 1)


























1987 p 211)












philosophy













everyday life2
























































































































Notes








Reerences













University Press


York John Wiley





































Activityrdquo










(p 1)


























1987 p 211)












philosophy













everyday life2
























































































































Notes








Reerences













University Press


York John Wiley

































1987 p 211)












philosophy













everyday life2
























































































































Notes








Reerences













University Press


York John Wiley


















everyday life2
























































































































Notes








Reerences













University Press


York John Wiley



































































































Notes








Reerences













University Press


York John Wiley














narrative reflections — after after virtue

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