To be all meat and raw nerve is to exist outside of time and—momentarily—outside of narrative.
Jonathan Franzen (279)
From the arguments of this chapter, I want to draw a number conclusions that enter the ongoing path of the dissertation as a whole. In order to even in principle assert that our lives are narratives in a literal sense, we must do so in the overarching context of an ontology that allows us to avoid two otherwise entailed and insurmountable problems.
First, we need to have some grounds to deny that we are really, according to the most final accounting, biological organisms. If we can't find some way to avoid simply
condoning this materialist claim, then we have to admit that any narrative quality that our lives or selves possess is honorific and higher order, not basic to what we are, and thus not literally assertable. We are describable both as biological organisms and in other terms; what is at stake is which description, if any, is most basic. Second, our ontology requires some structural filter in place such that we don't have to admit that every last detail that could potentially be part of a chronicle of our lives is finally part of them. If we don't have this, then we have no reason to describe such an exhaustive accounting as narrative. At the same time, I think there is something to Goldie's worries of postmodern exaggeration and Vice's about categorical error. We don't want to jump to the ontological extremes of flatly denying that we are biological organisms or denying the facts of the many minor details related to our lives. We thus need to agree with the implicit line of argument in MacIntyre that we are different things according to different descriptions.
There is both a true sense in which our lives are narratively shaped and our selves are characters defined by these plot arcs and there is a true sense in which we are just material things and our lives are inherently meaningless paths in space and time,
endlessly describable in detail. We need to go one step further in asserting an ontology that explains how such claims might function simultaneously. I'll argue that Heidegger's conception of being-in-the-world offers productive ground for such a way forward.
It is necessary at this turn to locate my claims about commonsense and realism, denying that we're really biological organisms, and so forth, against philosophical
naturalism. “Naturalism” is a heavily contested term—both in the sense of what it means and whether it is true—and it is not my intention to enter into either type of debate here.
In the broadest sense, I take it to be the view that the sort of entities that the natural sciences investigate are what there really is. Thus explanation of other, higher-order phenomena will eventually need to reduce to these materialist explanations (even if we are far from being able to do so yet). This is to put naturalism in ontological terms, as a thesis about what exists. It is sometimes also articulated as a methodological thesis: only the scientific method of hypothesis and verification (or falsification) is a valid way of establishing knowledge. Intuition, biblical revelation, metaphysics, mythology, storytelling, and so forth are not.29
Naturalism is at the heart of many contemporary thinkers' understanding of philosophy. Anything that runs afoul of it runs the risk of becoming a kind of
Hegelianism or worse, spinning metaphysical theses about the world out of nothingness.
In my analysis of Schechtman's evolving views on narrativity, it seems to me that she wants very much to avoid saying anything that runs afoul of naturalism. For thinkers of another sort, naturalism is a non-starter, as they don't see how even in principle it could ever explain human activity. Again, it is not my purpose to enter into these arguments, only to locate myself against them, but a frequent starting place for motivating
phenomenology is this: matter is never about anything else, yet we're all familiar with the basic intentionality of thoughts and words, and also with the way a story is about
29 See Williams 2002, 22-27 for further discussion.
something. Taylor argues repeatedly against naturalism, and though he finds it deeply
“implausible,” he still thinks we need to understand why, with the Enlightenment, it becomes a pervasive view. Similarly, MacIntyre rejects behaviorism, perhaps the most popular form of naturalism contemporaneous to After Virtue. He argues that there are no such things as basic human actions available for neutral description, prior to being interpreted for meaning. Rather, human action can only be understood against a
background of our understanding of what constitutes meaningful or intelligible behavior
—which in turn draws on interiority, intentions, and beliefs not reducible to a materialist explanation.
The question of whether beliefs, intentions, intentionality, and so forth are reducible to naturalist explanation is far beyond the scope of my project here. Two points, however. First, if one wants to use literary terms like narrative, plot, character, and so forth more than metaphorically in order to analyze selfhood, then it seems at least prima facie to be the case that one runs afoul of naturalism. One must be willing to move beyond the strictures of current commonsense (as Schechtman, I've claimed, is not) and ask openly what such an analysis suggests about a larger worldview. Second, it is far from sufficient to simply deny naturalism, as Taylor does. Denying the possibility of materialist reduction doesn't explain how narrativity is to be grounded. Whatever one's thoughts about naturalism, if we want to take narrativity seriously, then we have to begin to sketch an ontology and worldview that would explain how the dilemma I've proposed can be avoided. Moving forward, my aim will not be to naturalize narrativity, but instead to make some of its apparent commitments less counterintuitive such that we can see what kind of worldview might comfortably house the apparently overstated claim that
“life is a story.”
Chapter Five
How Sartre, Philosopher, Misreads Sartre, Novelist:
Nausea and the Adventures of the Narrative Self
Besides, art is fun and for fun, it has innumerable intentions and charms. Literature interests us on different levels in different fashions. It is full of tricks and magic and deliberate mystification.
Literature entertains, it does many things, and philosophy does one thing.
Iris Murdoch (4)
If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (434)
Both those who write in favor of and against the notion of the narrative self cite Sartre and his novel Nausea as exemplary opponents of it. MacIntyre writes: “Sartre makes Antoine Roquentin argue not just [...] that narrative is very different from life, but that to present human life in the form of a narrative is always to falsify it” (AV, 214).
Similarly, Strawson writes that “Sartre sees the narrative, story-telling impulse as a defect, regrettable. [...] He thinks human Narrativity is essentially a matter of bad faith, of radical (and typically irremediable) inauthenticity” (AN, 435). This type of interpretation of Nausea is blindered and relies on an impoverished approach to reading fiction typical of philosophers: of taking one character at one moment as mouthpiece for both a novel as a whole and the author behind it. Beginning as it does in description, the novel
challenges these conceptual orders rather than taking one side or the other; it thus invites us to rethink the terrain of narrativity. My argument here will move through three parts.
First, in the main section of the chapter, I sketch a more holistic reading of Nausea and its notion of “adventures.” Second, I suggest, calling on Heidegger’s distinction between the ontic and ontological, as well as categorical and existential analysis, what the broad shape of a revised conception of the narrative self might be. This is the decisive shift of the dissertation, moving us from my criticisms of contemporary debates into my own positive interpretation of Heidegger as offering a conception of the narrativity of the self.
Finally, I suggest that this leaves us with a robust notion of why the novel as a form has
philosophical importance, an importance exactly passed over by the sort of approaches that allow, for example, Nausea to be reduced to an argument.