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so far. Everybody within a culture must in some measure, for example, be able
to enter into the exchange of the linguistic community, even granted that this
community may be divided by idiolects and registers. Another domain that
must be widely (though roughly) shared for a culture to operate with requisite
effectiveness is the domain of social beliefs and procedures - what we think
people are like and how they must get on with each other, what elsewhere I
have called “folk psychology” and what Harold Garfinkel has called ethnoso-
ciology (Garfinkel 1967). These are domains that are, in the main, organized
narratively.
What I have tried to do in this paper is to describe some of the properties
of a world of “reality” constructed according to narrative principles. In doing
so, I have gone back and forth between describing narrative mental “powers”
and the symbolic systems of narrative discourse that make the expression of
these powers possible. It is only a beginning. My objective has been merely to
lay out the ground plan of narrative realities. The daunting task that remains
now is to show in detail how, in particular instances, narrative organizes the
structure of human experience - how, in a word, “life” comes to imitate “art”
and vice versa.
Notes
.
Zuckerman, Harriet, personal communication. She can be reached for further informa-
tion at the Department of Sociology, Columbia University, New York.
.
See Spence (1982). An unwillingness on the part of a patient to accept the psychoanalyst's
version or interpretation of a narrative is likely to lead to an examination and reformulation
by the latter of the former's story as having to do with the patient's “resistance.” The pa-
tient's version is made to conform to the psychiatrist's version as a price for the therapy's
continuation. While lawyers, typically, in translating the client's personal “story” into a legal
narrative, offer the client options in how the “facts of case” shall be legally framed - whether
things “add up” to a narrative about contracts, torts, or rights to due process, say - the final
legal story is, nonetheless, forced into a “canonical” narrative that conforms to prevailing bi-
ases in the society while also corresponding to some precedent in the law. So, for example, in
recent American jurisprudence, the “facts of the case” of
Bowers vs. Hardwick
is interpreted
as a violation of sodomy statutes of the State of Georgia rather than as an instance of the
exercise of the individual's rights to privacy as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the
United States Constitution. The “fact” that a homosexual act is, in this case, between con-
sulting adults is thereby ruled by the Court as “irrelevant” to the legal story. For a discussion
of the effects of imposing “official” jurisprudential story forms on everyday narratives, see
(Lane Scheppele 1989).
