Comparative Literature and Decoding the Complexities of the Baltic Sea Region

Analysis of narratives within literary studies

Analyses within literary studies may seem irrelevant as it is to do with fiction. But the media focus on narratives shows that what scholars have been discussing for centuries is important: We organize our lives into stories, as individuals, but also as societies.

In her keynote lecture at the conference Study Conference of Scandinavian Studies (Arbeitstagung der Skandinavistik) in Munich in September 2022, the literary scholar professor Unni Langås presented a "national basic narrative” about the Second World War in Norway. She argued it was a series of chronologically organized events, composing a story of how the war happened, distinguishing the protagonists from the antagonists. The narrative is crucial for the Norwegian understanding of these historical events, both sociologically, but also regarding the representations of the war in literature (the topic that interests her the most as she is a literary scholar working with the theories around postmemory).

Jerome Bruner’s article “The Narrative Construction of Reality” can help us understand what narratives are and how they work. The article was published in 1991, another year of great changes in Europe and the world when a redefinition of the stories we tell ourselves and others became very important. Bruner (1915–2016) was a psychologist, but his concept of narratives can be applied in an interdisciplinary way to literary studies, but also history, political sciences, culture studies, international relations, anthropology, and many more. The questions he poses in the text are universal with regards to both time and space, and can be defined as a natural part of the process of trying to understand the basic rules of the human existence, such as:

• How do we perceive, learn about and “construct” reality?
• What set of “cultural tool kits” do we use in the process?, and:
• Do different cultures perceive the world differently?

Bruner argues that we, as humans, have a natural tendency to organize our experiences into stories that are then told and retold. He writes, “As I have argued extensively elsewhere, we organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative – stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on. Narrative is a conventional form, transmitted culturally and constrained by each individual’s level of mastery […].” (page 4) Regardless of what type of narrative we are talking about – individual or collective, used in literary, sociological or historical context, explicit or implicit, Bruner argues that there are ten features – or categories – that can be defined and used in order to analyze narratives (Narrative diachronicity, Particularity, Intentional state entailment, Hermeneutic composability, Canonicity and breach, Referentiality, Genericness, Normativeness, Context sensitivity and negotiability and Narrative accrual). They may all be used in order to critically approach or even deconstruct (false) narratives, identifying and defining them as such. But it is the last, tenth feature Bruner mentions that seems particularly interesting here: narrative accrual, the idea that narratives build and feed upon each other: “Culture always reconstitutes itself by swallowing its own narrative tail” (page 19).

This all opens up a discussion about the cultural and sociological tissue that constitutes societies – not very unlike Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality, but in a broader sense. Perceiving the world through such a lens may lead to the conclusion that everything is connected with everything else, creating a continuous and coherent whole. This sort of awareness helps people to decide what lies behind narratives and therefore decode what is ‘real’ and what is ‘narrative’, that is, manufactured with a certain agenda.