Table Of ContentNarrative and Truth
PREVIOUS PUBLICATION
Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love (2010)
Narrative and Truth
An Ethical and Dynamic Paradigm
for the Humanities
BARRY EMSLIE
NARRATIVE AND TRUTH
Copyright © Barry Emslie, 2012.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 ISBN 978-1-137-27544-8
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-44618-6 ISBN 978-1-137-27545-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137275455
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Emslie, Barry.
Narrative and truth : an ethical and dynamic paradigm for the
humanities / Barry Emslie.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–1–137–27544–8 (alk. paper)
1. Humanities—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Narration (Rhetoric)—
Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Knowledge, Theory of, in literature.
4. Literature—Philosophy. I. Title.
AZ103.E47 2012
001.3—dc23 2012016611
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: October 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 An Overview 1
2 Marxist Humanism: Hegel, Marx, Lukács,
Eagleton, Habermas 27
3 Women and Writing: Women Theorists, Women
Novelists, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë 55
4 Freud: Science as Narrative, a Perverse and
Singular Teleology, Certainty Masquerading as Doubt 89
5 Philosophy and Fatherland: German
Transcendentalism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism 115
6 Realism: Brecht, Sport, the Bible, Lenin,
Conspiracy Theories 151
7 Death 185
Notes 215
Bibliography 231
Index 241
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments
I would like in particular to thank Herta Frenzel who helped with the
preparation of the text, and Dr Falk Schmidt whose comments and encour-
agement were invaluable. Both are protected by the usual disclaimers and
are in no way responsible for the shortcomings of this book.
I am also grateful for the help of the librarians at the Bertolt Brecht
Archives in Berlin and, in particular, for their permission to quote from
the archive material used in chapter 6.
Chapter 1
An Overview
“Madame,” declares Ernest Hemingway to his imaginary interlocutor at
the end of the eleventh chapter of Death in the Afternoon, “all stories, if
continued far enough, end in death.” And so they do. This simple but uni-
versally experienced fact is customarily dismissed as so crudely self-evident
as not to be worth troubling about, or is circumvented by theories of resur-
rection and reincarnation, none of which—even on their own terms—are
able to gainsay death as an event. Hemingway is well aware of this and
finishes his sentence with “ . . . and he is no true-story teller who would
keep that from you.” And although there is never but one true story, true
storytelling is what this book is about.
Not surprisingly, the fundamental categories of death and narrative
generate a plethora of eclectic themes, and the specific thematic material
out of which the epistemological and normative claims of this book are
constructed are dealt with in a free manner in this chapter. It should also
give the reader a better idea of how the general argument will play out in
detail in the following six chapters.
Death is the notion that, paradoxically, most powerfully affects our lives.
It compels us to acknowledge that we are narrative creatures. Moreover, we
can in the most personal manner physically chart the unfolding of just that
narrative. Adorno, for instance, is remorseless:
What death does to what is socially condemned, is anticipated biologically
in beloved human beings of great age; not only their bodies but their ego,
everything which determines them as human beings, crumbles without ill-
ness and violent intervention.1
But even in the face of Adorno’s grim picture of degeneration, it may seem
unfortunate that, in an age that has sanitized death and left the individual
2 Narrative and Truth
in technologically advanced societies victim to a machine dependent
demise, we have lost that feeling for its presence, which Benjamin had in
mind when he wrote that once “there wasn’t a house, hardly a room, in
which someone hadn’t died.”2
The great deathbed scene, whether serious as in War and Peace when
the illegitimate Pierre is allowed in to see his dying father or comic as when
Gianni Schicchi or Volpone rob the greedy relatives, is hardly possible in
Western fiction any more. The dying are not at home, and anyway they
are too far gone to talk. Instead, in our entertainment culture death is
often served up as mass, computer-generated slaughter or transmitted as
raw newsreel film of Third World disasters. Its meaning is altered in both
cases—in the first because it has become kitsch and in the second because
we are forced into strategies of detachment in the face of gratuitous horrors
that, we may feel, have no place in our living rooms.
Nonetheless, it does not matter how convinced we may be that the
sun will daily seem to rise above the horizon, or how enamored we may
become of the returning seasons, we know that following birth, our lives
are ostensibly linear: we grow, possibly procreate, and then, assuming we
get to run the full course, degenerate and die. We are in our commonsense
understanding of ourselves and the societies we make, not cyclical, but
teleological. And no matter that it may seem morbid or pessimistic, our
prosaic death-shaped teleology is unmistakably goal fixed.
Yet, it need not be pessimistic. Even if we forgo the consolations of reli-
gions that either purport to offer eternal life or “transcend” death by tak-
ing us round and round the course of existence ad infinitum, the greater
narrative that we call history—a narrative that by its very character tran-
scends the fortunes and potential nihilism of the individual or the single
generation—holds out the possibility of progress. Paul Ricoeur’s observa-
tion that “what is ultimately at stake in the case of the structural identity
of the narrative function as well as in that of the truth claim of every
narrative work, is the temporal character of human experience” would be
incomplete if that temporal experience were restricted to either a single
individual or generation.3 When, for instance, he rhetorically asks “What
is more intimate to life, more part of it, than death, or rather dying?”4 only
half of the matter has been broached. Later the missing element surfaces,
but he regards it as, in part, a rationalization. Death indicates “that the
replacement of generations is the euphemism by which we signify that
the living take the place of the dead.” Hence “the idea of a generation
is the insistent reminder that history is the history of mortals. But death is
also thereby superseded . . . In history, death, as the end of every individual
life, is only dealt with by allusion, to the profit of those entities that out-
last the cadavers—a people, nation, state, class, civilization.”5 With respect
