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Reference to the self is ubiquitous in contemporary culture. But what is the self? Is it discovered or created? To what degree is it shaped by external forces and to what degree is it subject to internal control? How do the stories we tell about ourselves shape our identity? To what extent is it valid to invoke ideas of truth, sincerity, and authenticity in relation to the self? What kinds of self does literature delineate?
These are some of the questions we will be asking in this UCL podcast. In each episode, a literary scholar and a philosopher ponder how present-day literary representations of the self relate to what philosophers have to say about it. The literary focus of the first season is Outline, by Rachel Cusk; the literary focus of the second is The Years, by Annie Ernaux. In each episode, chapters or sections of these books are discussed alongside a relevant intervention in philosophy.
Scarlett Baron: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Selfy Stories, a podcast in which we consider what the self is or is commonly taken to be by considering some of the answers provided by philosophy and literature. I'm Scarlett Baron, an associate professor in the English Department at University College London.
Alice Harberd: And I am Alice Harberd, a PhD student in the Philosophy Department, also at University College London. In the last episode, we considered a paper by Marya Schechtman entitled Glad It Happened: Personal Identity and Ethical Depth, published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2020, and we considered it alongside pages 137-182 of Annie Ernaux's The Years.
Scarlett Baron: This week, we're going to be discussing a paper by Alice herself. It is entitled Narrativity is a Choice and we'll be discussing it on its own terms and with reference to the last 40 pages of The Years, that is, pages 182-225 in the Fitzcarraldo Edition. And I'm delighted to be able to say that we have a special guest in the studio today to help us think through Alice's paper. That guest is Emmanuel Campion-Dye, who has been an invaluable participant in the Philosophy and Literature Reading Group, which Alice and I have been running at UCL this year. We're very grateful to him for joining us in the UCL studio today to discuss Alice's paper and the close of Ernaux's wonderful book.
Alice Harberd: Emmanuel, welcome to Selfy Stories. Could we start by asking you to tell us a little about yourself? Who you are, what kind of philosophy you do, and what on earth led you to attend our Philosophy and Literature Reading Group.
Emmanuel Campion-Dye: Hi. My name is Emmanuel Campion-Dye. I'm in my first year of studying for PhD in Philosophy at UCL. Recently, I've mainly been looking at judgement in the work of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Ludwig Wittgenstein, but I'm aiming to connect this work to aesthetics in the future. What really interests me are the kinds of things we can say when we're asked to justify the judgments we make and how that differs between different kinds of judgments. How you might justify mathematical judgments, empirical judgments, or aesthetic judgments, and what's different about those things. So on some level, my interest in the reading group has been as simple as I sometimes work on aesthetics, and I like reading literature generally, so it's been fun to come along. But if I had to say something more, I think I'd say that I'm quite generally interested in the ways that people in different disciplines are inclined to make claims about art, so in particular, it's my impression that there are certain claims that philosophers would be much more likely to make about novels than English literature professors. For example, that novels can be objectively artistically valuable, that they have correct interpretations, that they're made worse by being immoral. These all seem to me things that philosophers sometimes say that English academics would be very unlikely to say and I was interested in coming to the reading group where there were both philosophers and English academics to kind of find out more about what happens when their disciplines interact.
Scarlett Baron: Brilliant. Thank you so much. Now, as regular listeners may remember, we'll be beginning with the philosophy story, move on to the literary story, and then let these blend together in the interdisciplinary story. Alice, are you ready to lead us through your own paper?
Alice Harberd: As ready as I'll ever be. The first thing to say is that this is work in progress, which means that, for those of you who don't do academic philosophy, working on philosophy can be very confusing, and it involves thinking about the same things over and over and over again, even once you've written them all down, often up to 19, 20 drafts, very normal, so everything I say here could completely change in the future, but this is where I am with this paper at the moment. This is a paper about narrative theories of the self. Narrative theories of the self are quite an odd jumble of different theories that philosophers have about what it is that makes somebody a self. Some philosophers when answering this question are interested in what it is that makes us the same person over time. How is it the case that I am the same person that I was when I was two, for example? Are the philosophers answering this question are more interested in things to do with agency? What it is that makes me a single person acting rather than others in the world? The paper that I've written today is about a prominent objection to these theories of the self. Roughly, what I do in the paper is as follows.
First, I frame a claim, which I'm going to refer to today as the minimal narrativity claim. So this is the claim that to be a self, we need a self understanding that is capable of narrative articulation. So what I mean by that is that if a person is to count as a self, then they need to have a way of understanding themselves, which they could put in the form of the narrative. It doesn't mean they actually have that, or done that or that they actually do do that, but that it would be possible for them without massively distorting what their self understanding looked like to put it into a narrative. This is what I think the smallest possible thing that all narrative theorists of the self have to sign up to, basically. So that's why I'm starting with that claim. Then I talk a bit about a prominent objection to this set of theories from Galen Strawson. He thinks that among other things that this minimal claim that I've discussed is wrong, and the reason he thinks it's wrong is that he thinks there are counter examples. He thinks there are people who he calls deeply non narrative. That is to say, he thinks it wouldn't be possible for their self understanding to be articulated in a narrative form without them massively distorting what they are like.
What I do in the paper is try and explain why I think Strawson is wrong about this, why I think he's wrong to think that there are any deeply non narrative people. And I do this by challenging his conception of what narrative is by looking at some examples of narrative in literature and elsewhere, which seem to suggest that narrative is a more plastic and fluid concept than the concept of narrative that Strawson has at the heart of his argument. And in doing this, I think what I hope to be able to show is that there isn't anybody who cannot, simply by thinking about themselves a little bit differently, express their self understanding in a narrative form. I focus in particular on some things that Strawson thinks are an obstacle to doing this, and I try to explain why those are not on my view, in fact, an obstacle to expressing on self understanding in narrative form. These include things like having quite a loosely invested relationship in your future or not caring very much at all about past versions of yourself or not feeling very connected to past versions of yourself. But yes, ultimately what I try to argue is that there is nobody who self understanding cannot ultimately be expressed in a narrative form without massive distortion.
Scarlett Baron: Brilliant. Thank you very much, very clear even to someone like myself who is not a philosopher. So now as a non philosopher, I'm going to let Emmanuel lead with the questions.
Emmanuel Campion-Dye: Okay. Thank you, Alice. My first question was about your interpretation of Strawson. When I was reading Strawson, I got the impression that the basic objection to seeing himself as a narrative was that he literally didn't see the distant parts of his life, either in the future or the past as himself. He didn't identify with those parts, and so, for him, creating a narrative using these as basic building blocks would be to take things which aren't really part of his self and express what his self is supposed to be using those, which he would see as inherently distorting. So just as an analogy, I think this would be a little bit like if for most people, you took the 100 years before they were born and 100 years after they died and looked at the events in each of those time periods which were related to their life and constructed a big story out of all those parts and said, look, this is what yourself really is. I think there's a kind of natural objection here which is, no, that's not myself.
Maybe those are the things that influenced me or something, but those things simply aren't part of what myself is. I wondered if Strawson might be able to say something similar using the distant parts of his own life that they aren't really part of himself, and therefore, that using those to construct a narrative at all would be distorting.
Alice Harberd: Yet, he could absolutely say that, and I think that’s such a good question because it helps us get a little bit more grip on what it is we're trying to theorise when we talk about theorising the self. Strawson starts this paper as you say with what might sound to some people like a slightly weird distinction between two different senses in which you might use the word self. One, as you were saying, refers to the kind of immediate sense of a self with whom I kind of identify right now. The other sense of a self is the person that I've been ever since I was born, and he doesn't want to deny that there's some kind of connection between the self he identifies with and the person he's been this whole time. It's just that that isn't a very emotionally rich connection for him. He doesn't care very much about previous Galen Strawson, as you might call it. And so, if a narrative theorist of the self said to him, you're wrong, even though you say you don't have a narrative self conception, you actually do because we can just build a story out of the previous versions of you, bam, we've got a narrative of yourself. He could absolutely object and say the issue here is that the things you're using are not myself. That roughly is the response anticipated by Marya Schechtman, who we've discussed in an episode last week, but this is actually in a different paper by her called Stories, Lives and Basic Survival. I think.
What she essentially says in response to that is that while he can all very well say that about theorising the self that he identifies with right now, there's another interesting philosophical question at stake when it comes to theorising the self, which has to do with the question about what makes a person the same person, even if you don't strongly emotionally identify with all the same stages. She says that there are two philosophically interesting questions in play here. One is about the self I identify with, and one is about the person that I am. Even if I don't strongly identify with all stages of that person. So the first one is what Galen Strawson calls himself and the second is what he calls Galen Strawson. Then Schechtman goes on to say that we can understand each of these entities as constituted by different narratives. So, there's one narrative which is of the person Galen Strawson, and he can absolutely object and say that this isn't the entity that he recognises as himself. But he'd be hard pressed to say that there isn't a philosophically interesting question about what makes it the case that this person is the same person throughout all the changes he undergoes in his life. But then there's another kind of narrative, and these are narratives which unify each individual persons stage. So each of the selves that for a time Galen Strawson does identify with. So, say he identifies with himself going back a year or so. There's a narrative which unifies this year long self as well. And if there was someone who only identified with an even shorter time slice of themselves, say a month or a week even, then there will be a narrative unifying that week long self too.
Emmanuel Campion-Dye: Okay, that's interesting. I suppose, I think, with regard to the first response. I think Strawson would accept that you can make something out of all these temporal parts that he doesn't identify with in this strong sense. And maybe he would say that's a life of a human animal or something like that, a life of a human animal with a certain name, which is Galen Strawson, but I think what he would object to is the idea that that really is a self or that's really how one should understand oneself. I think he takes it to be the case that his lack of identification with these past stages tells him something important about what he essentially is, what his self essentially is, that it's not something with this kind of continuity. With regard to the second response you gave, I don't know exactly what to say here. Strawson has an example in his paper of making coffee. He's imagining the objection. Well, when you make coffee, you have to be thinking about what's going to happen five minutes in the future after the kettles boiled and if it's instant coffee, you put the granules in and the water and waited for it to cool down enough that you can drink it. He says, okay, maybe this is narrative, but this is a trivial form of narrativity. It really seems like when narrativity theorists are talking about one's self being narrative, they are meaning something bigger and more holistic, and if he can push back against the first claim that events further apart in one's life constitute the narrative, maybe he'll be satisfied that he's responded to the narrative theorist.
Alice Harberd: Yes, so absolutely, so, on the first thing. I think you can agree that Strawson takes the lack of emotional identification with previous parts of himself. I think you can agree with him that that seems to him that it is telling him something significant about what a self is, whilst also thinking that that shouldn't be the final word on the matter. So you can take seriously his intuition that how to best theorise who he is is not to concentrate on his entire life, whilst also thinking that there are important things about Galen Strawson, even the immediate self that he does identify, which are going to be explained properly only if we do bring those things back in. An example might help here. He talks about the ethical status of the selfhood he identifies with quite a lot in this paper because I think one of the objections he's anticipating, is somebody saying, well, it's all very well to say the only self I am is Galen Strawson of the last three years, but what if you committed a horrific murder 10 years ago, are you saying you ought not to be in prison for it because it's not the same person that did it? He, of course, will say, no, that's ridiculous. I'm simply saying I don't strongly empathetically identify with that person that did it. I'm not saying I shouldn't be held accountable for that person's actions. And I think the worry is that when you start saying things like that, what you mean by self seems to come to mean something like emotionally engaged conscious experience. That just doesn't seem to do all of the jobs that we want the concept of self to do when we're employing it at other times, so Galen Strawson could be telling us something really interesting about a form of conscious experience that philosophers often overlook, and in fact, I think that he is. But you might think that that should not be the last word necessarily. It could be that that thing he's thinking about is not what we want to call a self when we're looking for the object of our theorising essentially.
Emmanuel Campion-Dye: Thank you. Another part of your paper that I was very interested in was what you thought about coherence. So people have a worry about narrative construction, turning one's life into a narrative in the way that you discuss, that that might be distorting. It might be the case that what people are worrying about when they’re worrying about this distortion is that when you represent a life in a narrative form, you're going to be imposing a certain kind of coherence on it that isn't really there. It seems like your response to this is to say that narratives actually don't need to impose coherence. There's lots of different narratives that don't impose coherence, and you use Ulysses and the Golden Notebook as examples of those, and you say that they confer intelligibility, but not coherence. I suppose my question is about how this relates to what you think a narrative is. Because I don't think it's enough to say that a narrative is something that confers intelligibility, because there's all kinds of ways of conferring intelligibility on something that are non narrative. For example, technical manuals and philosophy papers, hopefully confer intelligibility on things, but they usually don't involve narrativizing those things. So it seems to me that we need to say something more about what is to narrativise something, and until we've said that and identified it, we can't be sure in advance that it's not going to involve a distortion of the underlying thing.
Alice Harberd: Oh, that's really interesting. So I agree with you that it's definitely going to be fruitful to think a bit more about what is that makes something a narrative and what makes narrative intelligibility different from other kinds of intelligibility. But I'm not sure that this is one of those cases where we need an entire theory on the table before we can make certain determinate claims about the thing we're looking at. I think there's no logical reason to think we ought not to be able to say before we've fixed our theory of narrative, that, for example, they need and confer coherence that isn't there on what it is that they represent. That will be something I think that we should be able to work out even without having a solid theory on the table just by looking at enough examples that if we have counter examples that look like narratives, but don't confer coherence which isn't there, then, bam, the entailments broken, but I do think there are some important things to be said about what makes narrative intelligibility different. For something to be narrative, it has to have temporal extension. It's got to take time. So you can't have a narrative of something that just happens in an instant and nothing else happens. Maybe you could but in doing that, you'd be doing some modernist experiment about what a narrative is, and so it would be an exception that would prove the fact of a rule being there in the first place in a sense. So to start with, the intelligibility that narratives confer on things is different from say, scientific manuals and philosophy in that it's got to help us understand the character of something that is in time. And so normally, that would be the character of something changing over time, and how it is that all the events before and after have causal or even other important developmental patterns. So that's the first thing to say. I think the second thing to say is that when it comes to a narrative which is a self narrative, although it needn't be explicit and conscious as if there were a little voice in our head narrating everything we were doing all the time, although I believe some people do have that experience, it's important that the narrative confer intelligibility by including something like self reflexivity in it, which is to say that when you're engaging with your own narrative self understanding, you'll be doing so in such a way that you're aware that what you're doing is understanding yourself and that you're aware of yourself, you're aware of what mental states you have. You're aware of trying to think about them. I think that kind of minimally reflective character to the experience will end up being important. Whereas, for example, if a manual teaches me how to put an IKEA sofa together, it's not important that while I'm doing it, I think about the process that I'm doing as one of putting together a sofa. There's nothing to be gained by doing that unless I want to become a master sofa builder, and presumably because it's an IKEA sofa, I just want to make this one. The other thing is that narrative intelligibility is going to be a kind of intelligibility which particularly helps us with finding forms. So there are lots of different ways of understanding things. Some ways of understanding things are simply understanding causal laws, and I've said a bit about how that's going to be involved in narrative understanding. But I also think that a kind of pattern recognition will be very important in this case.
Emmanuel Campion-Dye: So as an example, I was trying to think about ways in which one might be worried about the kind of distortions that narrative understanding over one's life would give. And I'm now thinking that maybe this just takes us back to what we were talking about earlier about breaking down a single narrative into lots of different ones. The example I was thinking of was a hypothetical collection of detective short stories, where there are some overlapping themes and characters. There are stories referenced in the other stories such that it's clear that these take place over time, but where essentially each story acts as a distinct puzzle. Now, it seems to me clear that we could, if we wanted to, interpret the ways that these stories linked together in some kind of narrative, so that there's some overall unified structure of what's happening to the characters and their relationships developing over time. But it also seems quite clear that thinking about the short story collection like this could be really distorting to what's essentially going on in that short story collection. That if you tried to talk to other people about your experience of reading it and you just talked about it as this kind of overall narrative, you might easily confuse them and that we might actually be quite inclined to make very different claims about the collection considered as a narrative, where all these things are linked together and when they're not. For example, maybe the overall narrative is quite weak and quite badly put together, but the individual puzzles are very interesting. And so when considered as a narrative, this collection is bad and maybe deserves a negative aesthetic judgement. But when we consider each piece individually, they work out and they're interesting. And I guess it doesn't seem too strange to me to think that Strawson might think something like this could be going on.
Alice Harberd: Yeah, I think that can absolutely happen, and I think it's absolutely what Strawson is worried about. I think one way to see that worry with the example of a person is something like, imagine somebody who you're close friends with at school, and then they move away to university and all kinds of things about them and you change. And one tempting thing to say might be something like, oh, well, they moved to a place where suddenly they were in a different environment and this caused them to change in a whole series of ways or it could have just been random, or it could have just been a natural part of growing up that their interests changed. The Strawson worry is something like, if you have narrative theories of the self, you're always going to be inclined to do the sort of causal explaining over explaining, when actually some things are just down to happenstance. I think that's an absolutely fair worry to have, but I don't think it's a worry that's entailed by a narrative conception of the self, for the very reason that I don't think that narratives necessarily need to impose coherence because I don't think they necessarily need to be coherent. As I'm thinking of narrative, it's a scalar concept. That is to say, a representation could be more or less narrative. There are some things that are going to be really obvious paradigm examples. There are going to be cases where it's not really clear if they're narratives or not, and then there are going to be things that obviously aren't them. And the only claim I want to make is that thoroughgoing coherence is simply not necessary for a representation to be narrative. You might have a second worry, which is even if it's not necessary, isn't the fact that it's some might think typical of narrative. That could be a worry because it means that if your paradigm of narrative is something that has that kind of coherence and then you apply to your own life, exercising that kind of mental muscle will drive you to see coherences even when they aren't there, just because that's what narratives are normally like even if they don't have to be like that. But argumentatively, I think that worry plays a slightly different role. One reason to be worried that narratives will make us see coherence where there isn't coherence is an epistemic one, so a kind of practical worry. Namely, well, that means we shouldn't use narratives because then we'll get the wrong idea about things. But that's not really the argumentative terrain that Strawson is in. I mean he is in it sometimes because he's interested in what goes wrong if you use narratives too. But if we put that to one side for a minute and if instead, we just focus on the question of whether or not it's at all possible to represent a life in narrative even if it's incoherent, even if there are various things that we might think of as a challenge to doing so. Then the significance of the question about distortion is different. Distortion, ie a narrative conception of yourself, making you think there's a coherence where there isn't one, for example, that's a problem because it indicates that there's something that you've had to change to, as it were, shove the square peg of your life into the round hole of narrative. So the significance of it is going to be in showing that, in fact, there are deeply non-narrative people who can't fit their lives on to narrative paradigms, rather than any actual practical effects of kind of what goes on. What that leads me to think is that for the purposes of deciding whether or not there are deeply non-narrative people, the fact that narrative needn't entail coherence and therefore, there's no need for a narrative representation to put coherence where it isn’t is enough, and the practical worries about what happens if you go about using that view of yourself are sort of different.
Emmanuel Campion-Dye: Okay, thanks, Alice.
Alice Harberd: I'm sure you have a lot more to ask me, Manny. But meanwhile, Scarlett, can you take us on to Ernaux?
Scarlett Baron: I will. I shall. Thank you. Today, our set passage is the powerful magisterial ending of The Years, and the books journey through time arrives at the end of the 20th century at this point and covers the early years of the 21st as well. The chronological focus to be more precise spans the years 1995-2006. And in this concluding section, the vein of metacommentary on the book itself, which is a theme throughout, takes centre stage. It assumes a very marked centrality and becomes a kind of urgent subject of the narrator's preoccupation as she prepares to lay down her pen. Re-read of her reflections as to her aims in the book and as to their evolution over the decades, and also about her quest for a form, which would do justice to those aims. What this means is that the questions of language and selfhood and the literary representation of selfhood that have been, in some way part of Ernaux’s purpose to tackle throughout become much more explicitly articulated. So I want to try and relatively briefly pick out some of her most interesting observations on these topics before homing in on the story that Ernaux ends up telling. So first, her acute attunement to the public realm and its conditioning force on the dispositions of a whole population, especially in the age of mass media but also, of course, on the individual human beings who make up that collective.
She comments, for instance, on the rise of identity politics. She observes the anxiety tainted with racism and classism which is nebulously encouraged as she writes by the culture at large in the 90s. She writes also crucially about the political and cultural trends that she detects as effects fueled by and reflected in language uses. Some sentiments, the narrator also notes come into fashion while others fall out of use. Ones we no longer felt and found absurd such as patriotism and honour. One of the words suddenly making the rounds, she says, is the word values, which by implication denotes a right wing rallying cry for the sweeping condemnation of youth, education, pornography, the civil partnership bill, cannabis and the deterioration of spelling. The theme of language seems to assume a prominence that it had not quite had before. Others around her are also decrying what she calls prefab thinking and the moral order. In other words, she's pointing out that she's not alone in feeling that language is congealing interreceived ideas before her eyes. She writes about watching television and feeling that languages collide.
The period according to the narrator offers a profusion of languages and expert opinions. The discourse of the nation that she observes on TV in the papers on magazines through statements of politicians and celebrities, offered, and I quote, countless ways of transposing life and emotions into words. Moreover that relative novelty in the 90s, the Internet engineered the dazzling transformation of the world into discourse. A new language and practise of psychology likewise provided models for putting the self into words. Significantly, the narrator remarks that with all this intermingling of concepts, it was increasingly difficult to find a phrase of one's own, the kind that when silently repeated, helped one live. Living in an era preoccupied by the putting of the self into words and driven herself by temperament to find a phrase of her own. The narrator's greatest fear as chronicled in these pages is about ageing and specifically about the loss of language which allows her to transform the world around her and her own experiences into narrative if it is narrative. The fear of not being able to put the self into words manifests in this final section through her sense that she needs a lover in order to have someone to communicate the insignificant acts and incidents of each day. This desire to give an explanation of the self, of herself, is one which has been in evidence throughout the book, but which here dovetails with her repeated account of her attempt to find the right form for her book. She recapitulates the trajectory of her own relationship to this ambition to explain the self. She writes on page 223 that in the old days, when she tried to write in a student room, she yearned to find an unknown language that would unveil mysterious things in the way of a clairvoyant. She also imagined the finish book as a revelation to others of her innermost being, a superior achievement, a kind of glory. This animating ambition has died as she aged, taught classes, had children. Those dreams deserted her. She writes, 'Because language is public and no mystical vision will produce a new language, she must work with what she has, which is what everyone has.' This is, I think quite an important moment on the threshold of the end of the book. There was no ineffable world that leapt out from inspired words as if by magic, and she would never write except from inside her language, which is everyone else's language, the only tool she's ever intended on using to act upon the things that outraged her. So this altered project so crucially make space for the incorporation of two dimensions beyond the writing of the self. It includes on the one hand, the task of seeing time and on the other hand, the task of writing the nation, the collective of which she is a part. In trying to find the right form to accomplish her self a timed task, the narrator considers drawing one what she calls the palimpsest sensation, which she sometimes experiences when time of an unknown nature takes hold of her consciousness and her body too. It is a time in which past and present overlap without bleeding into each other and where it seems she flickers in and out of all the shapes of being she has been. In her writing project about a woman who has lived between 1940 and today, another sensation that she explores as an alternative or a compliment to the palimpsest sensation, is that which she also has frequently whereby herselves, an important plural there, are characters in books and films, and she is the woman in Sue Lost in Manhattan and Clare Olan, which she saw not long ago, or Jane Eyre, Molly Bloom, or Dalida, who was a French singer and actress in these decades. In other words, she considers forging a form which would be shaped by her identification with the personalities, languages and life stories of others by basing her form on existing forms, her narrative on existing narratives. But neither approach will do, she realises, because what she really wants to do is, and I quote, save her circumstance. And so the form she has arrived at is the work of autosociobiography the reader encounters. The realisation of her ambition to, quote, sieze this time that comprises her life on earth at a given period, the time that has coursed through her, the world she has recorded merely by living. And it is from another sensation finally that she has discovered how to approach the job that she has set herself. That sensation which comes over her when she feels part of a larger group, when she seems, and I quote, to melt into an indistinct hole and manages through a painstaking effort of critical consciousness to find a kind of vast collective sensation that takes her consciousness, her entire being into itself. She will search within but only to identify the specific signs of the times. And so, se states this will not be a work of remembrance in the usual sense aimed at putting life into story, creating an explanation of self. She will go within herself only to retrieve the world, the memory and imagination of its bygone days, grasp the changes in ideas, beliefs and sensibility, the transformation of people and subjects that she has seen. It is a work of memorialisation though because more than anything, she would like to capture the light that suffuses faces that can no longer be seen. So what we get in this impersonal autobiography with no I, as she puts it, where languages polulate, where the subjects of so many sentences or plural is not a story of the self. But I would suggest that The Years does even if it doesn't take the form of what literary critics would typically refer to as a self narrative, richly testify to the storytelling drive in all of us and thus may support the view that narrativity is not a choice. The narrator's preoccupation with a story of explanation of the self drives her youth, and the search for a way to tell the story of the past is in the end, clearly stated just two pages before the end of the book. She writes there is no I in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only one and we as if now, it were her turn to tell the story of the time before. In telling this story, Ernaux picks up the baton from her elders who told her a similar story in childhood and thus, we loop all the way back to the very opening pages of the book, where we read on holiday afternoons after the war, time appeared out of nowhere and began to take shape. The voices of the guest flowed together to compose the great narrative of collective events, which we came to believe we too had witnessed. Time here in this paragraph from very near the beginning of the book is conjured through the telling of stories that is through language, which through its syntax of subjects and tenses, structures the world and assigns as a place within it, a place which in turn, we try to make sense of and attempt to claim agency over by telling stories to. For Ernaux’s narrator, that trying takes the form not of an attempt to find a phrase of her own in the end but instead of trying to hear the words people spoke, what they said about events and things and thus reconstitute a common time. And on that note, I think the time has come for us to move up to Level 3 and the interdisciplinary story.
Alice Harberd: Thanks, Scarlett. I love the ending of this book so much. One of the things I love about it is the ambiguity that there is between Ernaux’s constant use of words like story and narrative, while also seeming all the time to kind of be pushing up against what it is those words actually mean.
Scarlet Baron: Literary critics would say that this is a book which goes out of its way to resist a standard narrative structure and that that is why it has become so highly valued because it's an interesting approach to writing the self in ways which make away with the requirement to write in a carefully plotted event driven kind of way, say. But on the other hand, it clearly is a narrative, a narrative in which the story of the nation occasionally takes precedent over the nearly anonymous figure of the self through which it is accessed.
Alice Harberd: And I think one of the ways she does this really interestingly is in poking at the idea that narratives of the self are always narratives of only one individual Cartesian self. There's been a temptation in philosophy since Descarte to take the main object of inquiry as isolated individuals and to do our theorising about lots of things in terms of those, so philosophical questions like what is the mind? We look at what an individual mind is. We ask what knowledge is, we ask what it is for one person to know. If we're interested in ethics, we want to know what it is for one subject to behave right by one other or many others. But I think some objections that people have had to narrative theories of the self, focus on the idea that this kind of cartesian preoccupation gets things a bit wrong, and that the best way we understand ourselves is by understanding how we relate to collectives. And I think one thing that Ernaux helps us see is that it's not necessary for a narrative theory of the self to be a narrative theory of individuals in that way. You can do narrative theories of the self, which do their theorising by putting selves in the context of collectives. I find that a really interesting part of her kind of final formal realisations in this book.
Emmanuel Campion-Dye: I suppose, I think that there's one way of reading Ernaux here as making a kind of ethical point, which actually links back to what I said earlier as a counterexample to the narrative theories of the self. This idea of, you know, what if we made a narrative out of the hundred years before and after a person's life. There's a way of reading what Ernaux is doing here as suggesting something quite a lot like that, as suggesting that what a person is is constructed out of many more materials than maybe people would be usually inclined to construct the narrative out of.
Alice Harberd: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I also think it testifies to the plasticity of narrative as a form, so the way Ernaux uses narrative in this book is probably for those of you that haven't, as it were, been reading along with us, it probably looks very different from what you think of as your paradigm of narrative, like a nice children's book where there's a beginning and a middle and an end. There is no obvious setup of tension and resolution of tension in this book. In fact, there's a flat rejection of that because it just stops when she gets up to the present day. You know, there's no kind of moment where she defeats all her demons or the things that have been difficult for her in the past are suddenly dealt with. In that way, she draws attention to how if you say that someone has a narrative theory of themselves or a narrative understanding of themselves, it needn't mean that they have an understanding of themselves that has that kind of cute children's book structure. It can just mean that they are using a form of temporarily extended language with interesting forms of interconnection and formal invention to get a better grasp on what's going on with them. And for some people who feel themselves to be deeply culturally embedded, that's going to involve the whole reflection on the times before thing. I'm sure for other people that doesn't feel like a relevant part of what they're doing and perhaps for Strawson, for example, it wouldn't. But he could still have a narrative conception of himself that would lack, for example, the discussion of those 100 years before.
Scarlett Baron: Yeah. I think this is really fascinating, and I also was thinking exactly along the same lines as Emmanuel when he brought up that example earlier and how well suited it is in the book that we have before us. But what I find interesting about what you said there is the reference to the plasticity of the concept of narrative, and literary critics make the most of it by using narrative to describe any number of phenomena as perhaps do some philosophers. When you were talking about Galen Strawson, my impression is that with sufficiently plastic understanding of narrative, we could easily say that what he would put in a few sentences about his self at a particular moment, the moment where he's making instant coffee in the morning while listening to Bach, say, in preparation for a lecture, that that is narrative. It could be that it's in the present tense. I am a philosopher who at this moment, being employed at a university is having a cup of coffee because I'm very late in preparation for my lecture. Even if it's in the present tense, because language is a system of differences, the present tested including the past tense he might otherwise have used or the future tense he might have used. There's all sorts of narrative information that is contained even in the choice of a particular tense or a singular or a particular pronoun. And so it seems to me that if one takes that minimum unit of narrative as a definition, it’s not necessarily excluding the possibility of referring to his kind of fluid momentary self as narrative.
Alice Harberd: Yeah. But just to return to this question of Strawson and the triviality of the coffee narrative, though. So you were saying just then how using the present tense in some sense includes the past or the future or something like that.
Scarlett Baron: Or excludes it.
Alice Harberd: Or excludes it and so brings it to relevance or something. That's a very literary critic way of making a point that philosophers would possibly make a little bit differently. So what they'd say, and I think this comes up a lot in Ernaux's book is that when she merely records events, there's always a reason for recording them. The mere recording of a particular event means that she takes it to be significant in some way, significant in delineating what a particular time was like, a time in her life, or a time in everybody's life. And what that means is that when you get to something that looks really trivial and unimportant like making coffee, in fact, it can end up having this huge resonance across the entire story that she's telling. One example, she talks about a habit she has of having orange juice in the mornings, which is leftover from her first marriage, which she barely talks about. And I think what that highlights is the significance of small events in the present quite frequently depends on ways in which they've resonated throughout the past, such that these narratives which look superficially like they're actually very trivial and unimportant end up actually telling us a lot more than we think and can do that even though her way of writing narrative is not an emotionally laden way. She writes in this very kind of sparse and often almost blunt sounding way. I think that can help you see how this can be true of narrative without entailing some bizarre sentimentality about oneself. Manny, I saw you had something to say.
Emmanuel Campion-Dye: I suppose I wanted to say something to try and motivate how I think Galen Strawson conceives of himself. Because I think when we talk about this kind of thing, it can seem incredibly easy to say, well, obviously Galen Strawson has a narrative self.
Alice Harberd: I just want to say I don't necessarily think he does. I think he could and I want to make that very clear.
Emmanuel Campion-Dye: Yes, I understand. But I think the way to motivate how he's seeing things and how he's approaching things, I think for him, it's something like he sees himself as a engaged agent in the world now and there are lots of factors about the past that may have shaped the situations he's in, the circumstances, and so on and so forth. The conditions under which he makes decisions. What he is denying is that facts about the past literally constitute himself. I think he sees it as what he really is is just the being that's engaged in the decision making at the specific point in time, and so there's all kinds of ways that past and future events and conditions can affect that but those, as it were, act as kind of structuring influences on his being now, which is what he really is. Rather than him literally being something extended over time that includes all those past conditions.
Alice Harberd: Yes, absolutely, and I think here it's time to wheel on an important distinction that might help us out with seeing how that could be compatible with some of the stuff that we've been saying about Ernaux, which is that you can have a narrative theory of the self without thinking that yourself is constituted by that narrative. I know that sounds really weird because it's like well, what's the theory doing then. But one theory you can have is something like the following. You think that there's a necessary condition on selfhood, which is that in order to count as a self, you've got to have a self understanding and that that self understanding has to have features that make it possible to be recounted as a narrative. That doesn't mean that the narrative constitutes who you are. It's just that in advancing it as a theory of selfhood, the claim being made effectively is that reflection on the way in which that self understanding is narrative and how it relates to yourself is going to help us get a better grip on what the self is. So it doesn't mean that we have to think that what we are made out of, as it were, is self understanding. Now, some philosophers do think that but I'm not sure if it's the right way to think about it in this situation, because for example, you can think that what Galen Strawson is is not made out of a narrative, whilst also thinking that a really great way for him to get a grip on what he is is via a narrative conception of it, and that also that's not an accident. That the reason that a narrative conception is a good way for him to get a grip on the kind of thing he is is because, for example, humans are temporarily extended or we have certain kinds of emotional dispositions that make this the case, etc
Emmanuel Campion-Dye: I suppose the thing that I think he would say is that he doesn't think of these past versions of himself as himself in any important sense. He just doesn't identify with them, and he doesn't think those are the building blocks of what he is. But he does clearly have a conception of himself. And I suppose that I think that when you start looking at it like that, and you start thinking, okay, well, he's got this idea of what he is, and what that thing is intrinsically excludes certain kinds of things from being part of it. That you might, if you approach the kind of question like start to come up with a very, very different understanding of what a self is, such that it's not even necessarily of temporarily extended things at all. I mean maybe it has some condition of temporality in that it's temporary engaged, but it might not even be temporarily extended.
Alice Harberd: Okay, fair, so I see that but I still think that if it's going to be temporarily engaged, narrative is still going to be a possibly relevant tool for getting a better grip on it. I think we see that in Ernaux, she says she wants to shed light on particular images, and she gives examples and as you say, these are not processes that are temporarily extended. They're simple moments in time that she just wants to commemorate because they've been significant for her. I think there's an important way in which we can say that Ernaux's project also is about trying to understand the significance of identification with just the given moment in time. But the thing is is that understanding the significance of the present in much the way Scarlett that was talking about involves understanding it as something that's happening right now and that's not about to happen and isn't happening in the past. And to the extent that it involves understanding stuff as indexed with a temporal character at all, I think that's the thing that makes it the case that narrative can be a helpful notion for getting a grip on it, basically. I think we'd have to be beings that just didn't exist in a temporal dimension at all for narrative not to help. And I think the mistake that maybe I see philosophers like Strawson making is confusing a notion of narrative which is interested in, as you say, this kind of very rich, very kind of interconnected temporal extension. With a much barer and I think kind of truer to life, by which I mean how narratives are actually used in the literary world, as it were. A much truer to life conception of narrative is something that is interested in temporal character rather than particular kinds of temporal character.
Scarlett Baron: It's very interesting that Ernaux refers to both her self, but also to herselves in the plural. That way she seems to have some perhaps unwitting allegiance to Galen Strawson way of doing things, but at the same time, there is a clear investment in the power of storytelling to have some sort of benefits for self understanding and even national understanding. So I don't know exactly where that places her in this debate.
Alice Harberd: Well, if it were me, it places her as a direct counter example to Strawson, namely somebody who has what you might think of as the Strawsonian disposition when it comes to time and self, but nonetheless recognises narrative as an important way of exploring that.
Scarlett Baron: But that sort of seems to be the position that he does allow for when he says, I feel that myself is the self who can speak to his pleasure in granulated coffee in the moment. But also for the purposes of living my life, I do have a narrative which is outlined in my CV and which has led to me being a professor of philosophy, say. And he sort of allows for both, he just doesn't allow priority of one over the other.
Emmanuel Campion-Dye: I think it is also worth saying that, although Alice, I agree with you that The Years isn't a kind of simple children's narrative, there is a way of reading the end section as a kind of narrative of her coming to write this book. And that there's a continual thing from even really quite early on in the book, where she's thinking about making notes and thinking about writing at some point in the future in this desire to write and towards the end, it comes up more and more and more and there is a resolution that you get with her deciding on what the form is, feeling it's the right thing, committing to it, which is one of the things that makes the end so exciting.
Alice Harberd: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, where there is resolution in The Years is in it as a kind of metaliterary project of like, how do I go about writing this thing?
Scarlett Baron: It's also interesting that she does go for a basically straightforwardly chronological structure, and that is, in some ways a standard narrative form. That's often reckoned to be the most logical way of apprehending events. You order them in time and she basically sticks with that. So in some ways, it's quite a standard narrative.
Alice Harberd: Well, yeah, in that way, it is, but I think it's really interesting that the thing that she as it were allows herself to have the sort of, what you might think of as the narratively standard emotional relationship too, where there's a beginning, there's tension, there's resolution. The thing she allows herself to have that to is writing. When it comes to the rest of her emotional experiences and her experiences of significance, she doesn't really plot those sorts of arc in the same way. Some philosophers eg Alistair Macintyre, but much more recently say Peter Goldie, have thought that this kind of structure is essential to a range of emotional experiences, such that if you really have any feelings about anything at all, it would be very difficult not to find some sort of micro narratives in your own life. That because they're not just about making coffee, because they are actually about something that matters to you, are going to be harder to accuse of the kind of triviality that I think Strawson would want to accuse very short stories about my making a cup of coffee of, for example. And that to me, the fact that there is that therefore in Ernaux is not a reason to dispute the idea that she's in some way an important counterexample to Strawson. It's just a way to show that even the most strenuous attempt to kind of effectively bleach your narrative of narrative like structures and emotional commitments, still has one because that's the being we are, and even if Strawson isn't that being for very long at a time, it's also the being he is too.
Scarlett Baron: Yes, which is why I feel that narrativity isn't a choice, it’s just the way that we are. But we have to continue this beyond the microphones because we've come to the end of our time here in the studio. Thank you very much for listening.
Alice Harberd: Emmanuel, thank you so much for coming and asking me these questions. I really appreciate it.
Emmanuel Campion-Dye: Thank you for having me.
Scarlett Baron: And that, Alice brings us to the end of Season two of Selfy Stories.
Alice Harberd: What fun it's been. It's been greatly enjoyable and illuminating and exciting to talk and think all about these things together with you, Scarlett, and also our listeners. And we hope you listeners have found some food for thought in what we've had to say here.
Scarlett Baron: Thank you, Alice for guiding us through the ideas of Daniela Dover, Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor, Iris Murdoch, James Lewis, to speak only of Season 1, and Pierre Bordieu, Lucy O’Brien, Jennifer Robinson, Marya Schechtman, and your own paper, of course, in Season 2.
Alice Harberd: Well, thank you for guiding us through Rachel Cusk's outline and Annie Ernaux’s The Years. And thanks also to our guests, Clare Carlisle, Lucy O'Brien, and Emmanuel Campion-Dye, for joining us.
Scarlett Baron: And thanks, finally, to all those who participated in the UCL Philosophy and Literature Reading Group from which this podcast was born.
Alice Harberd: Yes, we thought your ideas were so exciting, and we've really enjoyed having another chew over them in these podcasts. And though we may not have worked out what's actually going on with the self at all, I think in some ways, we'd be disappointed if we had.
Scarlett Baron: And so for now for both of us.
Alice Harberd: Good bye.
Scarlett Baron: Good bye.