Michael Jackson’s book is an engaging, complex, and insightful study of narrative theory from an ethnographic, interactive perspective. This expanded version of his earlier analysis of Iraqi and Somali refugee narratives in New Zealand draws upon and develops Hannah Arendt’s understanding of storytelling at the intersection of individual and community. He sees narrative not as the production of an individual but as an interaction that lives in the in-between space of the personal and the collective. Further, following Arendt, Jackson approaches storytelling as techne, “strategies for active living in the world” (14) rather than episteme, knowledge about the world. In his conclusion, he writes, “I have sought to demonstrate the strengths of Hannah Arendt’s argument that storytelling transforms our lives by enabling us to reshape diffuse, diverse, and difficult personal experiences in ways that can be shared” (259). Jackson more than succeeds in this effort; others have observed that storytelling can be transformative, but Jackson asks the important questions of how and to what extent storytelling traverses the multiple gaps in making sense of senseless experiences, in understanding others far-removed from one’s own experience, and in sustaining both transformation and doubt. Storytelling might assert truths about experiences, but, at the same time, it invites doubts about that certainty. “The impartial understanding attained through storytelling is linked, therefore, to the doubts that arise from displacement” (257).
The narratives Jackson describes often are located at sites of ethical dilemmas and political controversy. Some involve retaliation or reconciliation, and many are stories of suffering, including those told by soldiers, victims, refugees, and stolen Aboriginal children. He refers to them as “the extraordinary stories of ordinary people” (29), and his research is informed by the fundamental question of how narrative provides a means to see beyond one’s personal experience. Further, and importantly, he is interested in how narrative can transform how we understand our experience (144).
Jackson’s discussion engages in the complex interplay between remembering experiences of loss and suffering, and using storytelling to gain agency. He asks, “If stories, lives, and journeys are so intertwined, what happens to our capacity to tell stories when our lives are torn apart?” (31). Drawing on Arendt, Jackson argues that agency is always intersubjective and always part of a social interaction. In insisting on intersubjectivity as central to creating and claiming agency, he offers an important critique of the subjectivist position that equates a story and an individual (rather than social) life (40). He writes, “While it is my aim to place stories in social context and clarify their structural transformations, my overriding concern is with the ways in which stories facilitate an intersubjective dynamic, in which the condition of social viability is shown to depend on a balance that people strike between being subjects for themselves and objects for others” (180).
Jackson discusses what he calls the in-between space of intersubjectivity that defines narrative in the social world (246). Reviewing the work of Walter Benjamin, Arendt, and others, he interrogates the complexity of this position across several domains, including space and time, across cultural difference, and across the before and after of trauma. He points out how the in-between space creates affordances and obstacles, for example, creating a generalized account of events that are too close for comfort to be told personally, and, alternatively, criticizing a generalized, mythologized, account for obscuring and compressing personal experience (145).
One of Jackson’s driving questions regards the possibilities of transformation afforded by narrative. He is critical of discussions of identity in narrative scholarship as over-simplified and often inaccurate. Identity categories “convert subjects of experience into objects of knowledge” (132). They belong to episteme, knowing, rather than techne. Beginning with the premise that identities are always co-produced, Jackson identifies how narratives work at multiple levels, personally, transpersonally, and impersonally (226).
In his discussions of narrative, Jackson carefully avoids reducing narratives to simple functions. Taking up a position argued by many folklorists and linguistic anthropologists, Jackson writes, “It is possible to analyze narrative without reducing it either to an external ‘social’ function or an internal logic” (180). In my view, most of the claims made for storytelling are reductive at best, offering false promises to make meaning out of experiences that are beyond comprehension. In contrast, Jackson examines both the possibilities and limitations of storytelling.
This is a book worth reading and re-reading; it serves as a compelling account of the stories he recounts and describes and also as a model of interactive narrative analysis.
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[Review length: 742 words • Review posted on January 12, 2016]