The quest of the discourse of narrative establishes a claim for objectivism or an external explanatory matrix. It foregrounds foundationalism, a spatial or temporal initiating point and universalism. In locating commonality of customs and traditions experience is essentialised. The quest narrative solidifies the individuation (Foucault 1998) of experience. The individual is the cornerstone of reaching, or failing to reach goals and aspirations. Life is structured within a process of moving successfully from one goal to another goal, one stage to the next stage. Life is explained within a framework of cause and effect that effaces the complexity and contrariness of life (Stone 1995).
5.6.1 Discovering the origin
The discourse of narrative is positioned within a philosophical quest for knowledge about one’s own life and is grounded within the possibility that to understand something is to discover its origin (Colne 2000). The narrative structure of linearity is an attempt to recreate this genesis. Narrative offers a resolution to any tensions and contradictions in one’s life by patterning and sequencing events in a seamless way. Through the discovery and realisation of the quest’s goal, one can achieve a greater sense of harmony and balance. Only by encountering and coping with the various harms, dangers, temptations and distractions that form the basis of any quest’s episodes and incidents, can the subject finally understand and realise the goal. The goal is seen as freedom as opposed to a gaol (Conle 2000; Foucault 2002b).
5.6.2 Achieving the real
The discourse of narrative outlines the quest for a unified subject and the completeness of knowledge as a factual representation of empirical reality, rather than a fictional construct (Clough 1998). The quest narrative as an experience of self-development moves to authorise such development of self as real and achievable in a final or foundational form. The repetition of the invocation that the self can be ‘found’, ‘discovered’, reclaimed and ‘searched for’ creates a position for these ideas as natural. Within the discourse of narrative, melodrama is used to heighten the emotional significance of the journey of self- discovery for the subject. The creation of dramatic events and situations is framed through expressing great and ‘deep’ emotions. This also contributes to the construction of an atmosphere of reality. The events are seen as real because they evoke strong, deep, corporeal responses. In detailing the common, every day aspects of the subject’s affective life, the authenticity of his experience is foregrounded. This has the effect of drawing the reader of the text into the richness of the experience. Richness and depth is equated with realness and authenticity (Ellis 1997; Denzin 1999). The repetition of these tropes within the narrative discourse contributes to hiding its own constructedness. The essentiality of the self that can be found is claimed by the discourse as a factual reality. This hides and subjugates the non-linear construction of subjectivity that the journal also constructs (Belsey 1980, p.51; Butler 1999, 1997a; Clough 1998; Ellis 1997; Denzin 1999).
5.6.3 Detecting the authentic
The pursuit of truth is constructed in a dialectical tension with deception within the discourse of narrative. One aim for the subject within his quest is to uncover his authentic self. The authentic self stands in opposition to deceptive aspects of the self. Examples of
the deceptive self include the closeted self, the irrational self, the vanquished and forlorn self that is not in a stable and monogamous relationship, and the non-enlightened self. The subject acts as a detective on a search to reveal the mystery and authenticity of the self by revealing its true identity and origin. The subject’s predicament and stage in life, as a ‘troubled, closeted, beat user’, occludes the authentic and self-actualised self from being realised. Authenticity is searched for through appealing to rationality and logic; by analysing his own experience within the binaries of true/false, right/wrong, and by logically tracking a linear pathway to self-improvement. The positioning of sexuality as a ‘secret’ that the subject has chosen to share with others, structures this aspect of the self as discrete and integral to self-identity. It is a pre-existing given, ‘harboured deep within’ that has been subjugated ‘trapped, about to explode’ and oppressed through the heterosexual order. Its naturalness, its essential nature is strengthened through its disclosure. It is made more real through the close examination of its hidden substrate (Foucault 1998).
5.6.4 Integrating an essential identity
The initial equilibrium or beginning for the quest narrative is structured as heterosexual identity. This is questioned through the subject’s homosexuality disturbing this equilibrium or normativity. The quest or journey that is structured for the subject is to find a resting place or another state of equilibrium that is the stable and integrated gay identity. This journeying to an imagined community is fraught with danger and risk. Risks of setting out, exposure and loss are considered as necessary parts of the goal to arrive at a stage of integrated identity and belongingness within a community. This narrative frame of journey and quest naturalises and solidifies the Enlightenment and modernist ideals of reaching wholeness, foundation and actualisation. The narrative frame also encompasses a stage model where change and progress occurs in developmental sequences that occur in linear fashion. The stages of coming out gay that occur are an awareness of sexual feelings, exploration of these feelings, acceptance of these feelings and integration of these feelings. Coming out is also constructed within ideas of ‘bravery’, ‘risk’ and ‘courage’. All these are necessary steps to the generation and achievement of a healthy self concept where the subject can be true to himself. The healthy self is evidenced in the subject’s goal to heal his ‘fractured and irrational’ mentally ill self. By retaining its essentialist economy the narrative preserves the regulation of practices that construct identity and inhere aspects of the character as natural and essential as opposed to constructed (Butler 1997a, 1997b, 1999; Munt et al. 2002).
5.6.5 Locating causes
A logic of causality also works to establish and arrange events in meaningful patterns (Cranny-Francis 1994; Miller 1995). The naturalisation of the temporal linearity of sequencing aspect’s of the subject’s quest also assists to solidify a logic of causal linearity. Just as events are seen to occur in developmental stages or a natural progression from one step to another, certain events are seen to naturally and unequivocally cause other events and outcomes (Kress 1985).
By establishing the causes of the oppressed self the subject identifies those who are guilty in reproducing society’s structural inequalities. By identifying those aspects of his self that have been influenced by these inequalities, the subject is in a better position to be able to refuse participating in perpetuating these inequalities (Gough 2002). The local and particular become generalised, extrapolated to claiming a universality or generalisability with respect to the subject’s life. The similarity can be asserted as law-like and natural. Alternatively a conservative romanticisation of the particular can occur where one’s own story is privileged over someone else’s. Neither of these approaches focuses on attending to the ways in which a narrative frame imbues the story of a life with particular meaning (Stone 1995).
5.6.6 Closing down contradictions
The discourse of narrative effects the negation of the contradictions and inconsistencies that the subject faces. It works to ‘other’, that is make abnormal, different and therefore less than, the contradictory elements of the subject’s constitution. In othering or delineating those parts of the self that don’t make sense, that don’t appear to be contributing to a sense of wholeness, they are constructed as not whole and therefore made into a problem. The wholeness that is constructed through the searching and quest component of the narrative subjugates these other aspects of subjectivity. The possibility of these other aspects becoming counter-narratives is subjugated. Rather than multiple selves being celebrated they are seen as evidence of a troubled soul. Through journeying and facing the obstacles that stand in the subject’s way he will become ‘complete’. It is this completeness that leads to truth. There are as many absences as presences in the way that the subject is formed. There are more instances of the non-location of the subject, its loss, its non-coherence, its unfoundedness, yet these are subsumed within the overall quest for presence (Stone 1995).
5.6.7 Valorising the autonomous, masculine self
Within the discourse of narrative, a particular construction of masculinity that valorises independence, competition, individualism, success and achievement is fashioned. This occurs within the contexts of career, but also in relation to the body and personal relationships. Autonomy is valorised, ‘A journey or quest that only I can take’. What is absent from this discourse is interdependence. Learning can occur from others but not with others. The self is ‘solitary and isolated’, involving a ‘search for perfection’ where the self is not able ‘to make mistakes’.
The masculine hero of the quest narrative, who is the active principle of his destiny, overshadows that which is feminine and not susceptible to transformation. The masculine conqueror, founder is privileged and admonishes those other-than-male aspects of the self which foreground uncertainty, instability and tentativeness. The way that the masculine sutures the idea that finding, questing the solid and coherent self as the substance of agency, disallows or makes it difficult to access an other, more partial and contradictory knowledge (Davies 1991; Clough 1998; Butler 1997b, 1999).
5.6.8 Locating the problem within the individual
The linear structuring of the quest, coming out and the resolution of obstacles that the subject faces have the effect of locating the trajectory of change within the individual. The individual is the site where change has to occur. The focus of responsibility being laid upon the subject’s shoulders means that the potential for any lapses in focus and determination also become contextualised within the individual. The discourse of narrative as a quest solidifies the individuation of the change process. The achievement of change is equated with individual capacity and resource, as is the non-achievement of change. The individual is causally involved in progression and change. The site of change is located within the individual as an entity as opposed to the confluence between subjectivity, discourse and language (Davies 1991, 1997; Kress 1985).