Sun, Dec 05, 2004 page9

• `Narrative': The new story of `story,' and make sure it's coherent

  • By William Safire / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  "A narrative is the key to everything," said Stanley Greenberg, a pollster for US Sen. John Kerry, looking back at the election. He explained to reporters that the Republicans had "a narrative that motivated their voters."

  Robert Shrum, a top Kerry strategist, half-agreed: "We had a narrative, but in the end, I don't think it came through."

  James Carville, a Democrat in vigorous nondenial a few days later on Meet the Press, developed the theme on the hot word: "They produce a narrative, we produce a litany." (That's a list, or enumeration.) "They say, `I'm going to protect you from the terrorists in Tehran and the homos in Hollywood.' We say, `We're for clean air, better schools, more health care.' And so there's a Republican narrative, a story, and there's a Democratic litany."

  Thus has political science dipped into the latest terminology of literary criticism to explain an election. In 1966, the essayist Roland Barthes declared, "Numberless are the world's narratives," and his structural analysis of stories helped give birth to the discipline of narratology. In that year, Robert Scholes of Brown, now president of the Modern Language Association, co-wrote a book with Robert Kellogg titled "The Nature of Narrative," defining the word as "all those literary works which are distinguished by two characteristics: the presence of a story and a story-teller." Reached at Brown, Scholes updates his brainchild: "Right now there are competing narratives of actual events that go on. It's what we call `spin' and `spin doctoring.' After an event, there are people who want to control the perception of that event, and the way they do that is by intervening with a narrative."

  Peter Brooks, now of the University of Virginia, wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2001 that the Starr Report about president Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky presented its major findings in a section titled "Narrative." He noted that this title "was a play for public acceptance of a certain formal construction of the events and their meaning. Had Starr chosen a more cubist approach, readers would have of course constructed their own narratives -- they did in any event. The claim that there was one narrative was a pre-emptive strike against dissenting opinions." (In the same way, Lee Hamilton of the Sept. 11 commission said of its 2004 report, "We finally cut all adjectives and ended up with a sparse narrative style.")

  Reached by e-mail, Brooks replies: "The use of the word narrative is completely out of hand! ... While I think the term has been trivialized through overuse, I believe the overuse responds to a recognition that narrative is one of the principal ways in which we organize our experience of the world -- a part of our cognitive tool kit that was long neglected by psychologists and philosophers."

  I am now wading into deeper water, but that is part of the gripping, dramatic story of today's column. This swiftly flowing but easy-to-follow chronicle of a word is a far cry from the back-and-forth time frames, character convolutions and cubist splintering of motivation that characterize much postmodern fiction.

  Jim Phelan, editor of Narrative, the apt title of the triannual (that's three times a year) journal of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, defines the word as "the representation of events and characters in some causal or at least noncoincidental sequence." The Ohio State professor says that "several of us on the Narrative listserv" -- that's a closed fraternity of Internetties -- "had a discussion about the Democrats' concern with Kerry's coherent narrative or lack thereof."

  Aha! Does that mean that a coherent narrative is the key to victory on Election Day, as Carville and other political narratologists now claim? "It must be one that the voters will deem to be more persuasive than the other candidate's," Phelan says. He suggests that the Bush campaign's labeling of Kerry as a flip-flopper "implied that Kerry was not even capable of constructing a coherent narrative."

  So that's what did him in. But the Buckeye State professor adds a nice wrinkle to the plot (gotta have a plot -- no plot, no narrative coherence). "Much of this analysis applies to the Democrats' call for a coherent narrative itself. That is, they are selecting events from the campaign and abstracting from them in order to supply a coherent narrative of why Kerry lost. Their coherent narrative is that he had no coherent narrative." (Go back and read that last sentence again. It's a real grabber of an insight.) "But if 75,000 of my fellow Ohioans had voted for Kerry instead of Bush," the guru of narrative adds with a certain political pragmatism, "the Democrats would probably be congratulating the Kerry campaign for having constructed a coherent narrative."

  There you have a story line with a nice twist at the end. No litany, or dreary list of issues, on that listserv. You were once a mere reader; at this moment -- here at the denouement of this story of a word that fought its way to become first the cynosure of the literati and now the favorite son of the politerati -- you have been transformed into the narratee.

  Wiggle, wriggle

  The Wall Street Journal editorialized that Iran is using its dialogue with Europe to win "diplomatic wriggle room" to develop a nuclear bomb.

  This triggers the wiggle-wriggle controversy. To wiggle is to move from side to side, or to and fro; from this we get wiggle room, defined in this column 20 years ago as "an implicit opportunity for later flexibility ... not quite an 'escape hatch' or a 'way out."'

  For these two decades, wiggle room has been continually challenged by wriggle room, which has the advantage of alliteration. However, wriggle (from Old English wrigian, root of awry) means "to squirm, writhe, move sinuously," as distinct from wiggle, which denotes back-and-forth motion, not necessarily twisting.

  I'm not knocking wriggle, which -- when followed by out in diplomatic parlance -- vividly calls up the picture of sneaky evasion by artifice. But when paired with room, wriggle has not succeeded in dislodging the more limited, precise and less pejorative wiggle. Although there is a joyous kindergarten quality to wriggle room, wiggle room predominates in current usage by more than 14 to 1.
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