The preceding three sections have developed a theoretical account of the link between historical time and narrative time. I have argued that narrative time is ‘internal’ to historical time, in the sense that historical time is a lived time, and that narrative forms and practices shape lived temporal experience. I have also argued that historical time is an intersubjective time, generated through the tension between shifting ‘spaces of experience’ and ‘horizons of expectation’, and configured through interpreting and narrating shared pasts, presents and futures. Finally, I have claimed that because there are always multiple narratives and interpretative ‘horizons’, historical time is narrated and configured in multiple and internally complex ways, which have a political dimension and significance. Yet, whilst it has been important to give a theoretical account of the relationship between narrative time and historical time, it is also important to consider how these theoretical discussions can inform feminist historiography in more practical terms, and influence the way we write and read histories of feminism. The problem of historical communication and experience, as Peter Osborne argues, is not just philosophical; it is also a problem of cultural form (Osborne 1996:133)91. In this regard, the challenge lies in considering how formal narrative configurations might express more adequately the multiple voices and temporalities that feed into and out of historical narratives and configure the shifting patterns of historical time.
In some respects, narrative as a cultural form presents problems for the feminist theorist or historian seeking to express multiple narrative trajectories and temporalities within the field of feminist history, because narrative structure so often works to mask the intersubjective interdependence I have described, and the ambiguities of historical
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interpretation. Once we have arranged past events into a recognisable narrative form, the past seems comprehensible and settled, making a depicted course of historical events appear finished and inevitable, and thus closing down alternative accounts. The linear and synthetic properties of narrative, and the authority of the narrative voice, for example, can have the effect of sealing up or masking the restlessness of the past, transforming indeterminacy and contingency into determinateness and finality. However, whilst the classic Aristotelian ideal of narrative form, which requires a holistic beginning-middle-end structure, is certainly pervasive (Aristotle 1996:13), this kind of narrative configuration is not exhaustive or inevitable. Indeed, as Genevieve Lloyd points out, there are many resources in narrative that go ‘beyond the tightly structured telling of a unified story with a beginning, middle and end’ and the limitations of the continuous narratorial voice or perspective (Lloyd 1993a:10-11). What is required, then, is not only a philosophical account of historical time and narrativity to inform our historiographical understanding, but also, an appreciation of the flexibilities and possibilities of narrative form and technique. Literary theorist Helen Carr poses the question as such:
‘If we are coming to see that cultures can be understood as collections of narratives, not only stories into which we are born… but also stories we learn to tell, how do these fractured forms explore the competing and conflicting narratives we meet in our culturally diverse society? (Carr 2011:321).
This kind of question gives rise to an immanent approach of working with and within narrative, trying to turn narrative’s figures and operations against oppressive or detrimental narrative determinations (Roof 1996a). Carr suggests that whilst nonlinear narratives emerge from the destabilising effects of traditional hierarchies of power, these ‘fractured forms’ can, in turn, work to interrupt and fissure those very master narratives which support these hierarchies (Carr 2011:322). In this regard, feminist literary theory offers many interesting insights and approaches to feminist historiography, as affirmed in chapter 2, as feminist
novelists and critics have uncovered and developed various techniques for creating ‘decentered’, ‘restive’ and ‘interactional’ narratives within women’s fictional writing, which challenge the authority of the single narrator and the autobiographical voice, and also linear organisations which perform a narrative ‘closure’ and finality92
. Such alternative narrative techniques can be used to portray discontinuities, repetitions, silences, and irresolvabilities, as a way of expressing ambiguities and variant interpretations93. The novelist Jeanette Winterson articulates this kind of approach nicely, suggesting that:
‘When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, and be retold’ (Winterson 2011:8).
Feminist historiographical writing itself also includes some examples of experimentation with dialogic narrative structures and nonlinear formats. One example is Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman’s introduction to their edited anthology Feminism Beside Itself (1995), written as two narratives in two side-by-side columns. The stories that each author tells intersect and echo each other, but by splitting the introduction into two, the authors force a recognition of the contested and polyvocal nature of feminist storytelling, and refuse a neat synthesis of perspectives. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back (1981) presents an even more thoroughgoing challenge to linear, narrative closure, as it intersperses more traditional ‘stories’ with essays and poetry, snapshot reflections, ‘stream of consciousness journal entries’, speeches, statements, dialogues, and letters. ‘One voice is not enough, nor two, although this is where
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Though of course, feminism as a genre has in many ways bolstered the authority of the narrative voice, and in particular the autobiographical voice, given that personal testimony and the ‘confessional’ style have been so prominent in feminist writing.
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The special issue of Women: a Cultural Review on ‘Disrupting the Narrative: Gender, Sexuality and Fractured Form’, offers several illuminating examples (ed. Carr 2011).
the dialogue begins’ (Moraga 1981:34). The created effect is one of multiple voices, styles and ‘cultural tongues’, emerging from a web of intersecting lives and stories that cannot be captured or subsumed within one overarching narrative or temporal schema.
As well as prompting experimentation with different ways of constructing and writing feminist histories, the idea of multiple ‘narrative webs’ and temporal horizons can also orient an alternative practice of reading feminist histories. This practice of reading is informed by an understanding that the historical and narrative context is always excessive of the singular narrative that would seek to give a definitive account of it. It may well be that a ‘narrative’ is ‘totalising’ in strictly formal terms, because, as Mink argues, it generates it own distinctive and bounded ‘imaginative space’ (Mink 1978). This, after all, is why we describe a narrative in the singular as a narrative. Yet, to think in terms of ‘narrativity’ is to recognise that singular narrative ‘wholes’ are only temporary closures, which are always incomplete and entangled with many other narratives. In other words, the production of a singular narrative depends upon the experience of a ‘communal narrative-matrix’ out of which it arises, and which it cannot fully express, even if its tries to disguise this through the figure of closure (MacQuillan 2000:23-4). This theoretical account gives rise to a practice of reading that Edward Said describes as ‘contapuntal reading’, whereby the ‘readerly subject’ extends their reading of texts to ‘include what was once forcibly excluded’, seeking out counter- narratives and recognising that the singular narrative only exists as an activity of production within a larger discursive and material context (Said 1993:79). MacQuillan extends this idea of ‘contrapuntal reading’, arguing that it is necessary to not only seek out excluded material and counter-narratives, but also, to discern the excluded material or ‘resisting strands’ within the material that the narrative presents. In this sense, he claims, counter-narratives can be thought of as structurally integral to any singular account (MacQuillan 2000:24).
From the perspective of ‘narrativity’, then, if historical narratives are constituted through intersubjective encounters and relations between subjects with different temporal orientations and horizons, it is inevitable that historical narratives will express that multiplicity of perspectives and experiences of historical time, ‘even when they appear to be
unified and coherent’ (Weiss 2011:174). Even within more ‘traditional’ narrative formats, there are always breaks and slippages that reveal a multiplicity and an indeterminacy behind narrative coherence and apparently seamless structure. To illustrate: Lynn Segal’s feminist memoir Making Trouble (2007) is constructed in the traditional autobiographical format, as the authorial voice guides us through her own political journey and simultaneously diagnoses the changes of the times. There is, however, an arresting passage when the author jumps out of her own narrative account into another’s narrative, which includes an account of Segal herself (depicted using a pseudonym ‘Marie’). Segal quotes this passage (with displeasure) in her own book:
‘She drew an … [un]flattering sketch of me at the time… as she saw us all within the collective household… We are easily recognisable, my name changed, incongruously, to Marie:
There was Marie who darted around the borough on political errands… Marie, up to her neck in local politics…’ (Segal 2007:77)94.
Segal is quick to resume her autobiographical narration, yet this opening out on to a different narrative has enacted a rupture that disturbs and unsettles the authoritative narrative voice. The sudden switch to biography, and then back to autobiography again, evokes a sense of ‘temporal strangeness’ through what we might term a ‘doubled retrospection’. Through seizing on such moments of temporal strangeness, and reading ‘contrapuntally’, we can tease out the relational, political and temporal dynamics that underpin any singular narrative, as we are offered a fleeting glimpse into alternative narrations and rememberings of a shared history.
CONCLUSION
The key aim of this chapter has been to develop an understanding of ‘narrative time’ as ‘internal’ to historical time, which enables us to explore the variety of ways that narrative practices and forms configure historical time. This argument depends upon a shift away from naturalistic ‘common-sense’ understandings of historical time as a ‘simple sequence’ of events. If historical time is understood, instead, as a ‘lived time’, we see that historical events have their own ‘internal’ temporalities, which are not limited to chronological sequence, but are also significantly shaped through narrative framings and configurations. One way of explaining the ‘internal’ relation between narrative time and historical time is via a phenomenological account, which demonstrates that lived time, or experiential temporality, cannot be reduced to the sequential temporality of ‘before-and-after’. Yet, whilst a phenomenological account can demonstrate an ‘affinity’ between the temporal structures of basic experience and narrative configuration, the phenomenological approach is in fact rather limited when it comes to accounting for historical time as a large-scale, intersubjective time. Accordingly, I have argued for a hermeneutics of historical time, which understands historical time as a narrated, interpreted time that mediates across experiential fields and temporal horizons. Hermeneutical theories bring narrative time to life, rather than confining it to the text, and reveal the poverty of the presumption that narrative time is an external ‘artifice’, imposed upon historical time from without. Moreover, the hermeneutical approach can be deepened and pluralised through drawing on ‘pluritopic’ hermeneutics, and the paradigm of ‘narrativity’, which posit multiple interpretative horizons within any experiential, interpretative context, and a complex of narrative matrices and palimpsests which make possible, and always exceed, any single narrative. This pluralistic theoretical framework can orient a flexible and experimental practice of writing historical narratives, exploring the
possibilities of multi-stranded and fractured forms. It can also inform a practice of ‘contrapuntal reading’, which detects and draws out multiple histories and lived times between and behind narrative closures.
The account of ‘narrative time’ given here, therefore, not only contributes to an internally complex conceptual model of historical time, it also affirms the possibility of expressing such complexity through cultural form and within historical practice. In addition, it has importantly challenged ‘common-sense’ presumptions that historical time is ‘really’ linear and chronological. However, as the first section of the chapter has acknowledged, historical chronologies do play a crucial role in configuring historical time, just as historical narratives do. The following chapter will therefore examine the temporal dynamics of historical chronologies and timelines in more detail, as I turn to the question of ‘calendar time’.
CHAPTER 4