Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio‐narratology

Frank, A. W. Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-narratology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp 224 25. 00 ISBN: 978-0-2262-6013-6 E-book 7. 00 to 25. 00 ISBN: 978-0-2262-6014-3 In the beginning was the story. People have always found stories and engaged with them because they help them to orient themselves in the ‘blooming, buzzing confusion of the world’. However, stories also helped people to find themselves and develop affiliations with other persons. It is by engaging in a dialogical relation with stories and thereby letting the inherent potentials of stories develop – or ‘breathe’– that both individuals and affiliated individuals may develop. This is the central idea in the American-Canadian sociologist Arthur Frank’s new book. This book is different from his two previous books on narratives. In the books The Wounded Storyteller (1995) and The Renewal of Generosity (2004) his focus was on stories told by people afflicted with illness, and in particular with what Arthur Frank terms ‘deep illness’. His new book takes a broader look at stories and how stories can be used to enhance human lives and relations. In the new book, illness, and the troubles it presents, is not discussed at all. At the same time the new book represents a continuation of a central tenet from the previous ones: telling and listening to stories is basically part of a moral project aimed at promoting a good life for both individuals and communities. Implicit in Frank’s new book is a criticism of some of the main strands of narrative analysis in social science that has developed during the last two decades. There are two ideas in particular which he opposes. Much of the recent research on stories and storytelling in social science has its origin mainly in the fields of literary studies and sociolinguistics. Historically, in both these fields formal analysis was championed as a scientific ideal resulting in the classical theory of narratology. In the narratological tradition the establishment of various taxonomies, or proceeding by defining formal narrative elements and their grouping into structures, was, and still is, central to the theoretical endeavour. This formal perspective both on stories and their analysis is foreign to Frank and he prefers to sidestep all questions connected to formal definitions and analysis of stories, even the question of what a story is. The second idea Frank opposes is the notion that stories and storytelling are inherently morally good. He criticises the idea often found in social scientific and medical research that stories and storytelling are inherently good because they fulfil personal, professional, institutional or political needs. Rather, Frank argues, it is through active, dialogical engagement with stories that at least some stories may turn out to be good stories. Fundamental to Frank’s book is the idea that people are surrounded by stories and engage with them. Stories help people to select and evaluate various aspects of the world and hence help them to learn about, and act in and on, the world. Stories also help people to define themselves and to find companions and to develop affiliation with others in groups, families or larger communities. Due to stories’‘narrative equipment’ people become caught up in some stories more than others (implying that not all stories are alike). Good stories have the ability to hold people in suspense, to engage their imagination and above all to call for interpretation. The kinds of stories that Frank uses as examples in his book are primarily written stories: fictional short stories, autobiographical stories or non-fictional stories. And it is mostly stories about people telling and listening to stories. In this book Frank focuses less on the actual act of telling, retelling or inventing and creating stories. Rather, people are companions to stories – not their authors but their interpreters. The analytical approach favoured by Frank is ‘dialogical narrative analysis’: an interpretation of stories that aims at revealing different subjectivities, i. e. various ways of understanding and experiencing the world. This is pursued through an analysis of all the possible perspectives that a story invites listeners to adopt. That means seeing events in the world not only through the eyes of the main character of the story, but also from the perspectives of the adversaries and the marginal bystanders in the story. This kind of dialogical narrative analysis will enrich story listeners and help them become more sensitive to various subjectivities. This is also the aim of dialogical narrative analysis: ‘to guide people to be good companions of stories, and through that companionship become good craftspersons of their individual and collective lives’. Formal, structural analysis of stories has little to contribute to this kind of analysis – it is rather the moral edification of both the individual and the craftsperson that is at the centre. The conceptions of narrative and narrative analysis presented by Arthur Frank go beyond what has become the established tradition among social scientists, and particularly among researchers studying illness narratives: he invites researchers to engage in dialogical understanding of stories rather than classifying them. Those social scientists looking for a closed set of analytical steps for doing narrative analysis will therefore be disappointed by the book: in place of methods, they will find a moral quest. Letting Stories Breathe is a beautifully written book: it engages the imagination of the reader and invites further interpretation and eventual retelling in classrooms and elsewhere.