Narrative thinking and experiential knowledge: the example of Ronald Sukenick.(Critical Essay)

Post-humanist discourses, by undermining the disinterested subject as the basis for conceptual knowledge, have brought narrative to the forefront of political thinking. Indicative of the revaluing of narrative thinking is the increasing prominence of the work of Hannah Arendt, for whom storytelling is the primary task of political theory and the source of political concepts. (1) For Arendt, though, rather traditional notions of narrative still prevail. As Robert C. Pirro shows in his Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy, the structure of Greek tragedy informs Arendt's narrative strategies and perhaps her political thinking as a whole in fundamental ways.

However, Eric B. Gorham, in The Theater of Politics: Hannah Arendt, Political Science and Higher Education, suggests that Arendt's notion of political freedom might be at least as well served through the appropriation of other, more innovative modes of storytelling. Noting that Arendt's assumption of the validity of traditionally "plotted" narratives relies upon her claim that the creation of the work of art involves the concealment of the act of creation itself, Gorham contends that "self-conscious writing [Gorham refers specifically to Mario Vargas Llosa and Paul Auster] suggests that the creative artist can also display publicly the freedom experienced in the act of creation." Such "plural texts," Gorham suggests--albeit briefly, in a footnote--which "require the reader to insert him or herself in the beginning and/or creation of the text" (43) might be important components of any genuine "spaces of appearance" in today's world.

Julia Kristeva's recent Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative, meanwhile, addresses Arendt's engaged but often reductive reading of major modern writers: "We can lament the fact that Arendt does not appreciate the intrapsychic but also historical need for revolt that led the avant-gardes of this century to re-evaluate without precedent the structures of narrative, of the word, and of the Self" (41). At stake in Arendt's ambivalent relation to challenges to traditional modes of storytelling is her insistence upon the recovery and articulation of "actor" and "spectator" politics and thinking. For Arendt, these capacities are both autotelic and hence the "highest" modes of activity. They are also interdependent, even mutually constitutive: political action finds its meaning in the spectators, who transform action into a lasting story, capable of crystallizing into new, courageous acts. Both politics and thinking, as fundamental modes of experience, finally, are in equally urgent need to be retrieved from the rise of "homo laborans" in the modern world. Arendt's insistence on firm differentiations and boundaries between these modes of activity, then, is an attempt to preserve the distinctiveness of each along with the possibility of empowering relations between them.

Innovative fiction's focus on the way in which storytelling is a mode of action in its own right, based on its claim to initiate something new and not simply represent, is, then, clearly a challenge to Arendt's articulation of thinking and politics. (2) However, Arendt's interest in precisely those modern writers who interrogated most thoroughly the bankruptcy of traditional forms of authority, subjectivity, and discourse (Brecht, Benjamin, Celine, Kafka, Proust, among others) derives from her conviction that the catastrophic collapse of metaphysics and the traditional authority it underwrote also liberated fundamental elements of experience from accumulated conceptual distortions. In this case, Arendt's ambivalence towards post-traditional narrative might open a productive site of inquiry. Pursuing the implications of Arendt's retrieval of action and thinking, and of her sense of the fragility of this retrieval, might enable us to examine how the boundaries between them have become (perhaps necessarily and productively) problematic.

Debra Malina, in her Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject, foregrounds the politics of metaleptic narrative (i.e., the violation of narrative boundaries separating narrator, character, and reader) by contending that "metalepsis in innovative texts has a transformative effect," insofar as "the metalepsis in fictional texts bears a mimetic relation to subject-construction processes in our own world" (9). (3) Paradoxically, the rigorous enactment and exploration of the artificiality of narrative boundaries is closer to experience than traditional, "realistic" narration. The reason for this, of course, is that "experience" is nothing more than the ongoing constitution, probing, testing, transgression and reconstitution of the boundaries separating and relating subjects to one another and their common world.

But the significance of metalepsis may not be, as Malina (strongly influenced by post-structuralism) suggests, in rendering these boundaries indeterminate and increasingly flexible; perhaps, rather, the discovery of metaleptic fiction is that the preservation of the boundary between thinking and action requires revealing this boundary to be internal to, and constitutive of, each of these fundamental modes of activity. If, that is, thinking's "inherent duality points to the infinite plurality which is the law of the earth" (Thinking, 187), this must be because this difference between thinking and acting is already intrinsic to thinking itself as a solitary, invisible activity that is at the same time sheer, self-generated activity. And, in fact, in her intrepretation of Kafka's parable, "He," Arendt links thinking to the consitution of meaningful time itself, situating it "between past and future," and describing its consequences narratively as "the path paved by thinking" (210).

Innovative, metaleptic, or self-reflexive fiction in that case actualizes this relation between "internal duality" and "infinite plurality." And no writer does this more effectively, and with a greater sense of the political stakes, than Ronald Sukenick. For Sukenick, narrative is "the quarrel of consciousness with time" (1). This "quarrel" is not only the basis and motivation for narrative, but is, more importantly, enacted and engaged in the act of narration itself: "the element of action ... is essential to narrative" (1), and here it might sound as if Sukenick is describing the "content" that constitutes narrative; but, he adds, "[t]he action in question, of course, is the action of mind meditating event" (1). Thus, narrative "employs representation" (2)--i.e., of actions and events--but is more fundamentally defined by its employment of representation to think about thinking ("a way of deriving conviction from experience" [3]), which becomes necessary once one considers that thinking is itself a form of action.