Who's the Narrator?

I just attended a three day workshop and symposium around the themes of Narrative Method, and Narrative Vulnerability and Ethics. Keynote speaker was Professor Catherine Kohler Riessman, from Boston University, who is a pioneer in narrative methods. Other speakers were Peter Isaacs and David Massey, co-founders of the Applied Ethics program at QUT, and various other academics, students, and practitioners of music, art, film etc. It has been a diverse and tremendously stimulating three days, and I have much to reflect on, to challenge my existing ideas, and to incorporate into my understandings.

The fundamental question that this engagement with Narrative raises for me is the nature of the Narrator. It seems to me that narrative implies a narrator, an authorial voice, if you will. Who is it that chooses what events to include or exclude, how to link them, who provides the commentary, and infers meaning from the resulting product?

I know that as I reflect on my experiences, my affects, my thoughts – as I am doing now with regard to the last three days – I craft these into a story about myself, to explain myself to myself, first, and then to others, about what kind of person I am, or am becoming. So I understand that identity is narratively constituted. If I chose to highlight different events, affects, thoughts, understandings, then a different self, a different identity would be produced. I have experienced this, in religious conversion, in coming out, in therapy, in the course of my own reflections. But the question remains – who is the ‘I’ who does this reflecting, this choosing, this editing, this constructing of identity? Where does it come from? How does it develop? What is its nature?

Furthermore – are there initially multiple voices, each speaking for different viewpoints? Are some progressively silenced, or are they made to sing in harmony, to tell the same story, in order to sustain the illusion of a coherent self, a single integrated ‘person’, so that others may feel they know what to expect in their interactions with us? Are there contrapuntal voices within, as well as without? This question arises from my own struggle to accept my incoherence, my multiplicity. I’ve come to view this as an anxious and responsible Border Collie, trying to round up the sheep and keep them together and going in one direction. Lately I’ve tried to tell the Border Collie to go off and sleep in the sun, and let the sheep browse where they will. As a gender scholar I have also observed a tendency in Western culture, to identify this multipleness with the female, and see it is as a source of weakness, as a fault. Many men like to see themselves as simple souls, consistent and dependable, while women are accused of being mercurial, fickle, always changing their minds, moody. Indeed our culture has so pathologised this multipleness, that it has come to be seen as a disorder, a failure to integrate, a handicap, a problem to be fixed, such as multiple personality disorder, or borderline personality disorder. It can also be seen in essentialist understandings of sexuality, which insists on tightly bounded identities of ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ or even ‘bi’, but which find leaky boundaries intolerable.

So I suppose my question is – who is the Editor, the Border Collie, the Choir Director, the Boundary Rider? Who tells the story, makes the voices blend, maintains the fences, keeps the sheep together? Who composes and narrates the Narrative?