Storytelling by Christian SALMON

Author:Christian SALMON
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

A few weeks before the 2004 election, William Safire, an old hand at political communications, mocked the spin doctors’ explanations in an article entitled “The Way We Live Now.” Mocking their analysis (“gotta have a plot—no plot, no narrative coherence”), he cites one of their number as saying that if they had won, the “Democrats would have been congratulating the Kerry campaign for having constructed a coherent narrative.” “After an event, there are people who want to control the perception of that event, and the way they do that is by intervening with a narrative.” The Democrat’s post-election “narrative” was that “Kerry had no coherent narrative.”

William Safire cites the analysis of Peter Brooks, an academic specialist in the theory of narrative: “The use of the word narrative is completely out of hand! … While I think the term has been trivialized through overuse, I believe the over-use corresponds to a recognition that narrative is one of the principal ways in which we organize our experience of the world—a part of our cognitive tool kit that was long neglected by psychologists and philosophers.”18

Prosecutor Starr, who wrote the report on the Monica Lewinsky affair, presented his major findings in a section titled “Narrative,” “in a play for public acceptance” of his interpretation. Safire cites Peter Brooks as saying: “Had Starr chosen a more cubist approach, readers would of course have constructed their own narratives … The claim that there was one narrative was a pre-emptive strike against dissenting opinions. (In the same way, Lee Hamilton of the 9/11 commission said of its 2004 report: ‘We finally cut all adjectives and ended up with a sparse narrative style.’)”19 The suggestion that there was only one possible narrative presumably improved the book’s sales.

William Safire was mocking those he called the “politerati” (literate politicians) and the “narratological” vulgate the spin doctors seized upon in the American success of the structural analysis of narrative inaugurated by Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Algirdas Greimas, and a few others. It paved the way for the new discipline Tzvetan Todorov called “narratology,” or the science of narrative. Barthes’ idea that narrative is one of the great cognitive categories that allows us to understand and organize the world was developed in Paris within a small circle of researchers at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. It had enjoyed such success in the United States that it was becoming something that any fool studying political science was familiar with. This was probably the first time that the name of Roland Barthes had appeared in a New York Times op-ed piece on an American election, but it demonstrates the extent to which political science had adopted the language and concepts of the literary criticism of the 1960s.

Yet when President Bush’s popularity rating collapsed after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, the same Safire rallied in despair to the narrative approach he had mocked in his December 2004 article. “I think now we’re in the grip of a narrative. And the narrative is ‘The president and this presidency is finished.

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