Why should criminology care about literary fiction? Literature,life narratives and telling untellable stories

In 2001, Shadd Maruna opened his still influential study of ex-offenders’ life narratives or ‘identity stories’, Making Good, with a discussion of a well-known work of literary fiction: Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). Maruna’s point is that popular discourse (represented by Burgess’s US American publisher, who changed the story’s ending) privileges a black-and-white model by which good stays good and bad stays bad; Burgess’s original version, by contrast, represents the complex contradictions, shifts and ambiguities of human experience in a way that is typical of literary fiction. On the back of Maruna’s work, recent moves have been made towards a ‘narrative criminology’ that engages literary theory and the tools of literary criticism such as analysis of plot and structure and attention to linguistic devices such as metaphor, direct speech and repetition, in order to interrogate and do justice to the complexity of the narratives of offenders (Presser, 2009; Sandberg, 2010; Yardley et al., 2013).

It seems timely, then, to ask why criminology should care about literary fiction, and – responding to Lois Presser’s (2009: 179) declaration of a need ‘to exchange ideas with academics in other fields’ – to examine the extent to which literary critical analysis can complement and extend the methods of social science. To do this I use both the methods of literary criticism (in particular a close reading of a literary text and its adaptation as prison theatre) and recent findings from narrative criminology, experimental psychology and desistance studies. In the context of the still influential notion of the ‘redemption script’ (Maruna, 2001), and of criminology’s growing interest in narrative, I suggest that ‘literariness’ might usefully be understood as a model of narrative practice that responds to potentially serious problems raised by the ‘rhetoric of redemption’ (Maruna, 2001: 85), and that such an understanding might enhance the practice of narrative work with offenders.

What is a ‘literary’ narrative, and what is its place in a prison?

My thinking about prisons and literary fiction began when I was a participant-observer and co-evaluator for two prison theatre projects (Anderson et al., 2011; Colvin and O’Donoghue, 2008), both of which encouraged prisoners to use elements from their personal life narratives as a basis for making theatre. This seemed to me at the time likely to be more effective than imposing an already existing canonical story (such as a Shakespeare play) as the template for a creative process. Timothy Rice (1992: 6–7) in The Meaning of Literature had argued persuasively that the idea of literature is inherently hegemonic, developed to be ‘the universal embodiment of ubiquitous values’ and to ‘correspond to a specific form of political authority, debate, and practice’. Prisoners clearly find themselves on the wrong side of political authority and practice; if there is a ‘prison field’ (in Bourdieu’s sense of the field as ‘a structured space with its own laws of functioning and its own relations of force’ (Johnson, 1993: 6)), it is not one in which works of literature might be expected to signify. Bourdieu suggested that ‘a work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded’ (Johnson, 1993: 7). Access to that code is gained through a long process of education that is determined not least by class. Prisoners do not normally come from privileged class backgrounds; a significant proportion of the prison population has never even learnt to read. Why, then, choose a canonical literary text as the basis for theatre with prisoners?

That is the standard practice of the Berlin prison theatre company Theater aufBruch (www.gefaengnistheater.de), which has been staging performances in Berlin’s Tegel prison since 1997 (Tegel holds around 1300 male prisoners, of whom around two-thirds are categorized as German, and around one-third – 37 per cent in 2012 – as non-German or Ausländer (Berlin Senate, 2012)). The company also stages an annual show outside the prison, with former prisoners and probationers. Unlike most prison and community theatre, the performances are not devised (i.e. collectively narrativized or improvised with the performers). AufBruch’s artistic director Peter Atanassow works with a professional dramaturge to adapt literary narratives for a performance script. In July 2010 I saw aufBruch’s Kohlhaas in Tegel. Kohlhaas was adapted by Atanassow from the German novella Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist (1978), first published in 1810 and now regularly listed on school and university curricula – a canonical work of literature. I had visited Berlin earlier in the year to visit the company and to observe a rehearsal session in the prison; aufBruch kindly allowed me access to the developing performance script.

Atanassow typically chooses literary fictional texts that address complex tensions between the individual and the social context, between personal and public righteousness, between self-justification, justice and the law. He insists that there is ‘never only one way of seeing things, never only one version of a story’ (cited in Hüttl, 2005). AufBruch’s shows have included versions of Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (in 1998), Beckett’s Endgame (2000), Heiner Müller’s The Horatian (2005), the Nibelung saga (2006), Goethe’s Götz (2007), Kafka’s Trial (in Charlottenburg prison, 2011) and Schiller’s Wallenstein (2013). All performances are advertised and open to the general public; tickets are bought in advance and audiences of the prison shows leave all personal belongings and a passport at the prison gate. The stage was until 2012 built in Tegel’s large central yard. In the blocks that surrounded it, prisoners in their cells watched audiences of outsiders watch fellow prisoners performing the show (‘who’s performing theatre for whom?’ one visitor asked) (Banneitz, 2011). In 2013 the show was moved to an unoccupied side courtyard in the prison.

Feedback from participants describes the experience of engagement with this ‘literary’ theatre neither as culturally foreign nor as hegemonically controlling, but on the contrary as engaging, even as liberating: Lopez, an actor in aufBruch’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, reported experiencing an ‘escape from isolation’ (Theater aufBruch, 1998). ¹ Lopez might be referring to the teamwork of theatre-making; but he might equally be describing his engagement with the narrative content. In words attributed to CS Lewis, we all engage with stories so as ‘not to be alone’ (Shadowlands, 1993): to escape isolation and feel part of a human community of experience.

AufBruch is not alone in choosing literary fiction for work with prisoners and probationers. There are a number of co-ordinated prison reading groups in the UK (www.roehampton.ac.uk/Prison-Reading-Groups), and a programme called Changing Lives through Literature (CLTL) has been used in the criminal justice systems of a number of US states as an alternative to a prison sentence. CLTL was founded in 1991 by Robert Waxler, Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, and Judge Robert Kane. Kane sentenced 18 men to probation rather than prison with the stipulation that they had to attend a modern American literature seminar run by Waxler (Trounstine and Waxler, 2005: 2; Waxler and Trounstine, 1999: 2). Eligibility for the programme depends on a ‘fairly’ long record; pending cases, ‘such that the conviction would carry a high likelihood of incarceration’; the ability to read; and ‘stated willingness to participate’ (Jarjoura and Krumholz, 1998: 130). A study conducted in 1993 followed up the first 32 men to complete the programme. The results indicated a recidivism rate in the CLTL participants of 18.75 per cent, compared to 45 per cent in a control group of 40 regular probationers (Jarjoura and Krumholz, 1998: 127). A follow-up study in 2004 measured 673 CLTL participants in five jurisdictions against a comparison sample of 1574 probationers in the same jurisdictions. Results indicated again that while ‘standard probation has little to no effect on recidivism rates’, CLTL participants show ‘a significant reduction in the rate of arrests before and after program participation’ as well as ‘a significant decline in the maximum severity of the offense charged for those who were rearrested’ (Schutt et al., 2004: 2).

But Jarjoura and Krumholz (1998: 130) found it impossible, on the basis of the data (participant profiles and reconviction rates; individual interviews), ‘to isolate the impact of the bibliotherapy’. The follow-up study similarly concluded with the observation that further research was needed ‘to elucidate the process by which the program influences recidivism’ (Schutt et al., 2004: 18). Jarjoura and Krumholz (1998: 127) point to three factors in the CLTL programme that its founders hoped would reduce reoffending: first, enhanced self-esteem derived from successful participation; second, the reintegration assistance offered; and third, ‘the literature content’. The first two factors – self-esteem and reintegration – are treated in desistance scholarship (recently for example by Davey et al., 2014; McNeill et al., 2012; Tett et al., 2012), but are not specific to bibliotherapy. The last – ‘the literature content’ – is specific to bibliotherapy, but apparently remains mysterious: ‘The act of reading, itself, may provide a catharsis’, Jarjoura and Krumholz (1998: 127) speculate. Earlier bibliotherapy research had hazarded that reading enables ‘a process of dynamic interaction between the personality of the reader and literature’ (Russell and Shrodes, 1950, cited in Roy, 1979: 57), and – particularly elusively – that ‘reading is important and helpful’ (Beatty, 1962, cited in Jack and Ronan, 2008: 172).

Neither bibliotherapy research nor desistance studies have been able to define more precisely why engaging with literary narratives is ‘important and helpful’. CLTL practitioners Trounstine and Waxler (2005: 9) refer to liberating effects: ‘stepping inside another’s shoes […] frees us’. Prisoner participants in UK and US reading groups reiterate the notion that ‘liberation’ is one effect of the alternative perspectives offered by works of fiction. Participant feedback frequently references the idea that readers of fiction are released from the isolation of the human subject, and from excessive self-focus or solipsism:

It’s made me realise there’s someone else in the room, and what’s going on in their head you have no idea, and fiction makes you think, what’s going on in that other head. (Men’s prison reading group member, cited in Hartley and Turvey, 2009: 31)

What I get out of the readings is how similar these people’s lives are to mine. We all go through some of the same experiences in different ways. (Participant, Changing Lives through Literature Dorchester men’s programme, spring 2003)

It just isn’t about me any more. (Participant, Changing Lives through Literature Dorchester men’s programme, spring 2002)

But Zunshine, while she uses literary classics – Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, Henry James, Virginia Woolf – to illustrate her argument, does not formulate a distinction between fiction and literary fiction (and the analysis thereby sidesteps the difficult issue whether it matters what kinds of other minds readers engage with). A recent experimental study conducted by psychologists does make that distinction, and assesses the effects of popular versus literary fiction on readers’ ToM processes and capacity. David Kidd and Emanuele Castano (2013: 377) conducted a series of five experiments to test their thesis that:

fiction may change how, not just what, we think about others. We submit that fiction affects ToM processes because it forces us to engage in mind-reading and character construction. Not any kind of fiction achieves that, though. Our proposal is that it is literary fiction that forces the reader to engage in ToM processes.

Kidd and Castano (2013: 378) avoid offering a definition of the literary, instead invoking a social consensus that leads them to choose ‘works of fiction by award-winning or canonical writers’ for use in their experiments. They rightly note the difficulty of ‘precisely quantifying literariness’. Literariness is probably not quantifiable by stylistic features as proposed by Miall and Kuiken (1999) – even though stylistic features are key to literary texts, stylistic features alone cannot make a text literary any more than technical expertise can make a painting into a work of art. I suggest that Kidd and Castano are closer than Miall and Kuiken to identifying a quality (rather than quantity) of literature when they observe that the texts are characterized by multiple rather than singular perspectives on the world, unpredictability in that they tend to upset clichés and stereotypes (sometimes at the same time as representing them) and a resulting complexity that simultaneously engages and challenges the reader.

Recent work in narrative criminology has acknowledged that a ‘detailed in-depth reading of narrative, to be meaningful, requires a small sample’; larger samples impede discovery of ‘the nuances of narratives’ (Sandberg, 2010: 451; Yardley et al., 2013: 7). This is especially true for literary stories, which I define below as peculiarly nuanced narratives. In what follows I analyse key structural (rather than stylistic) elements in the Michael Kohlhaas story of 1810 and in Theater aufBruch’s adaptation Kohlhaas in 2010 with a view to drawing out their potential relevance for narrative work with offenders. An investigation of this ‘small sample’ enables some exploratory conclusions about why and how literary fiction ‘works’. I begin with a close reading of the multiple perspectives or competing narratives in Kohlhaas.

Competing narratives and doubtful redemptions

Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas is a literary fictional rewrite of the historical record of Hans Kohlhase, a German horse-dealer executed in 1540. It is the story of a hitherto respectable citizen with a strong sense of his place in society, who becomes a criminal and an outlaw after a dishonest German nobleman or Junker snatches and maltreats his horses. Justice seems unachievable in a feudal legal system that is nepotistic and inconsistent, and Kohlhaas feels forced to defend what he believes are his rights as a citizen by becoming an arsonist and a murderer. Kohlhaas, Kleist’s narrator famously declares, is

one of the most honourable as well as one of the most terrible men of his age […]; he had not one neighbour who was not indebted to his generosity or his fair-mindedness […]. But his sense of justice made him a bandit and a murderer. (Kleist, 1978: 114)

Literature’s capacity, noted by Kidd and Castano (2013: 378), to offer a number of different perspectives on a story simultaneously, means that a literary narrative, however simply told, will tend to contain or imply competing points of view. Perceptive critics of Kleist’s novella have commented that its narrative voice ‘offers the reader a bewildering range of opinions on the central character’ (Allan, 1997: 631). Readers are told Kohlhaas’s story sometimes from a justificatory perspective that feels like Kohlhaas’s own; but also from other perspectives that harshly critique his actions. Kohlhaas calls himself the representative of the Archangel Michael, come to avenge the evil into which the entire world has sunk (Kleist, 1978: 148), and Kleist’s decision to name his character Michael (not Hans, as in the historical source), seems to give implicit support to that narrative. But Kleist simultaneously offers the reader a letter sent by Martin Luther (the Protestant Reformer) to Kohlhaas, which tells a different story, namely that the horse-dealer is a sinful rebel and not the warrior representative of a just God (Kleist, 1978: 150). From that perspective Kohlhaas’s narrative is merely one of the many ‘justifications for deviance that are seen as valid by the delinquent but not by the legal system or society at large’ (Sykes and Matza, 1957: 666). The elusive narrator never clearly tells the reader whether to admire Kohlhaas or damn him. It is possible to read both Kohlhaas and (or) the entire legal system and society at large in the novella as deviant and self-justifying. The narratives compete for validity.

Prose fiction can be narrated by a voice whose origin remains mysterious – the elusive narrator of Michael Kohlhaas has no name and no face. By contrast, voices in theatre (generally) belong to embodied characters. Peter Atanassow, adapting the novella for performance, created a Kohlhaas character played throughout by three prisoner actors from different ethnic backgrounds, designated Kohlhaas I (Volker), Kohlhaas II (Micha) and Kohlhaas III (Ahmed). In the prologue to the play, 14 prisoner actors, all designated Kohlhaas, voice a different mini-narrative or narrative fragment accounting for how a break with normality and the law happens. All 14 play one collective character: ‘they all become Kohlhaas’, ³ the stage direction reads (Theater aufBruch, 2010). Kleist’s multi-perspectival narrative is translated for the theatre into a multiple Kohlhaas, embodying plural narratives. Asking which story is ‘true’ is here, as in Sandberg’s (2010: 447) recent argument, less important than recognizing that ‘whether true or false, the multitude of stories people tell reflect, and help us understand, the complex nature of values, identities, cultures, and communities’. Like Kleist’s novella, aufBruch’s performance confronted its audience and its performers with the notion that truth is not a monolith but a complex negotiation of self, other and circumstance. Rules, justice, even facts are constructed, the opening chorus reminds its audience, and there is a fine line between citizenship and delinquency:

During today’s proceedings, consider

The deed well

Weigh it and don’t judge too quickly

For facts aren’t truth

And sentencing and justice

Sometimes diverge […]

Normality walks

On thin ice. (Theater aufBruch, 2010)

In Kleist’s story, Kohlhaas’s motivation for hunting down the Junker who has stolen and starved his horses is ambiguous. It can be read simultaneously as an expression of his sense of justice, and of his solipsism. Kohlhaas’s solipsism is reflected in what his wife, Lisbeth, does not say in response to his decision to sell everything they own, including their house, to support his campaign for justice. In response to his rhetorical question whether he should admit defeat and fetch his maltreated horses home, ‘“Yes, yes, yes!” Lisbeth wanted to say but did not dare; amid her tears she shook her head’ (Kleist, 1978: 135). AufBruch uses a Greek-style chorus to speak what Kleist’s Lisbeth cannot say:

Kohlhaas II: Can you bear it if I, your husband, let

Just anyone mess with me? I’m not a dog and won’t

Live like one.

Chorus: Dog or not dog […]

No-one expects

Of

You

That you act the hero

Kohlhaas II: That’s not what it’s about. It’s about my dignity.

Chorus: Dignity

That’s great. Dignity

What about my dignity

Two kids on my hands and their father

Disappeared because he had to go underground.

Kohlhaas II: I’m doing this for you too.

Chorus: For us

Don’t kid yourself. (Theater aufBruch, 2010)

AufBruch’s version of the story is not only multi-perspectival but – in the tradition of literary texts – heavily intertextual: the performance text contains fragments from Hamlet, from the Austrian dramatist Elfriede Jelinek’s work, from the poems of Friedrich Hölderlin and from the political texts of Germany’s Red Army Faction. A scene with clear echoes of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (famously performed in San Quentin State Prison in 1957) follows Kohlhaas II’s meeting with Martin Luther, and is worth citing in our context:

Kohlhaas II: Did you ever read the Bible? […]

Remember the story of the two criminals?

Nagelschmidt: No.

Kohlhaas II: There were two thieves, crucified at the same time as our Saviour. […] Two thieves, and one’s supposed to have been saved and the other one damned. […]

Nagelschmidt: Could you get to the point.

Kohlhaas II: How come only one out of four Evangelists told the story that way? All four of them were there. And only one mentions a criminal being saved. […] One out of four. Two of the others just say nothing about it, and the third says both of them abused him. […]

Nagelschmidt: You’ve lost me.

Kohlhaas II: If the third was right, then both thieves must have been damned. […] But all four Evangelists were there or at least thereabouts and only one of them mentions a criminal being saved. Why should anyone believe him rather than the others?

Nagelschmidt: Who believes him?

All exit, meanwhile:

Paul: What was that about? Who got redeemed?

Cetin: One of the criminals.

Wissam: But they all tell different stories. (Theater aufBruch, 2010)

The matter at hand is redemption: a significant term in literary studies as well as in criminology. In both, the term signals a process or development that is, whether we like it or not, mysterious rather than measurable. ‘Desistance from crime […] is something of an enigma’ admit some of the leading names in desistance studies (McNeill et al., 2012: 3). In Kleist’s novella, Luther indicates (through the use of the past conditional, the grammatical signal of impossibility) that Kohlhaas has made himself irredeemable by failing to forgive:

Would you not, all things considered, have done better to forgive the Junker for your Redeemer’s sake, and take the horses away, thin and scraggy as they were,and ride back with them to Kohlhaasenbrück for fattening in your stables? (Kleist, 1978: 154)

Complicating the redemption script

Maruna (2001) prefaced his discussion of ex-offenders’ life narratives with a motto from one of the great literary figures of the 20th century, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

In Making Good, Maruna (2001) begins with the thesis that all ‘selves’ are the subject (and object) of stories. Individuals are both socially constituted and have agency; and an ‘offender’ narrative can therefore be exchanged for a different kind of story, which enables or supports integration into mainstream society. Those kinds of stories are ‘redemption scripts’: coherent autobiographical stories that make senseof a criminal past in the context of a reformed present and future, but also (necessarily) in the context of prevailing cultural conventions and expectations. That is the framework within which ex-offenders ‘make sense of their lives’ in such a way as ‘to successfully maintain […] abstinence from crime’ (Maruna, 2001: 7, emphasis in original).

Maruna himself does not ignore problems raised by these sense-making scripts; nonetheless, those problems have tended to be ignored in the reception of his work. Redemption scripts rely, in his words, on ‘willful, cognitive distortion’ and bear ‘almost no resemblance to the ugly realities of the ex-offender lives’ (2001: 9). Their authors learn to participate in the ‘pleasant lies’ of a mainstream discourse that abhors ambiguity (Maruna, 2001: 145). The complexities of a difficult biography are streamlined to support ‘tellability’, and elements that would threaten the coherence of the story are elided. Maruna reads that as potentially positive: his subjects, he argues, are finding ‘reason and purpose in the bleakest of life histories’ (2001: 9–10). But he also notes with concern that a number of his ‘redeemed’ interviewees base their narratives on a highly conventional ‘us-and-them’ paradigm of criminality: ‘Several […] expressed views about the essential nature of “real criminals” […] no less conservative than the views of police officers I spoke with’, and that their descriptions often rely on ‘artificial-sounding clichés’ (2001: 167). That resonates with literary philosopher Garry Hagberg’s (2010: 136) argument that if stories fail to challenge established beliefs or knowledge then they are likely to turn us ‘away from growth, from openness, to the narrow, to the familiar, to the […] closed’, as well as with Kidd’s and Castano’s (2013: 378) account of popular fiction, which differs from literary fiction in that it ‘portrays the world and characters as internally consistent and predictable’ and is therefore likely to reaffirm readers’ expectations rather than challenging them.

To put it another way: as narrators assume a justified position in mainstream or popular discourse, they are subject to the problems and limitations of that discourse, one of which is black-and-white logic (an ingredient in ‘making sense’ that is often called ‘common sense’): the essentializing ‘us-and-them’ mentality noted by Maruna. In his conclusions, Maruna (2001: 145) finds society to blame:

if making an excuse (even if it is a ‘lie’ of sorts) about one’s past is required to explain one’s present behaviour, then this might be an important part of the desistance process. In other words, Western societies may prefer pleasant lies […] to the painful truth that good people often do bad things.

Kohlhaas the criminal-hero is both honourable and terrible, both virtuous and murderous. Kleist’s protagonist struggles with ambiguity at every level, including the semantic: the German word Recht has a wide range of meanings, from ‘right’ in the sense of right-hand side via rightness, righteousness and moral uprightness to justice, legality and the law; it appears 22 times in Kleist’s novella as a noun, three times as an adjective or adverb, and a further 75 times in 33 different compounds. Kohlhaas flounders in that ocean of meanings, struggling to recognize the distinctions between the (subjective) moral and the (objective) legal universes.

If aufBruch’s artistic director Atanassow were looking to provide prisoners with the certainties of the redemption script, this would not be a good place to start. But aufBruch’s Kohlhaas explicitly challenges the valorization of certainty over ambiguity in dominant discourse. After his wife’s accidental death, Kohlhaas leads a bloody massacre at the Junker’s castle. The Kohlhaas II character then steps out of role to deliver a commentary on certainty:

Commentary:

Micha: There’s a rocket. A very clever rocket and the people who invented it deserve my admiration. The rocket is called ‘Search and Destroy’. And that’s exactly what it does: it hunts down its target and destroys it. And if the target veers left, it follows the target and destroys it, and if the target hides, it finds it in order to destroy it, and even if the target surrenders it destroys it, because this rocket has decided to be in the right. I think it’s great, this certainty, this clarity of decision. ‘Search and destroy’. If you abbreviate the name of the rocket it’s SAD. So it’s a sad rocket that has decided to be in the right. (Theater aufBruch, 2010)

Michael Kohlhaas, the self-styled Archangel Michael who claims to inhabit, as God’s avenger, a provisional divine government on earth (Kleist, 1978: 148), displays (like the authors of redemption scripts, and like the imagined rocket) ‘an exaggerated sense of control over the future and an inflated, almost missionary sense of purpose in life’ (Maruna, 2001: 9). His redemption, however, is achieved not by making sense, nor indeed by anything he does, but by an act of grace – Luther’s sudden decision to send communion – that makes no sense at all, and can only be read as mysterious.

I am not seeking to challenge the well-evidenced notion that ‘making sense’ of life experience is key to mental and emotional well-being and plays an important part in trauma management, resilience and integration into the social mainstream (e.g. Bruner, 1990; Cohler, 1991; Maruna, 2001). I am challenging a widespread choice in the subsequent literature to overlook what Maruna himself acknowledges, namely a potential for brittleness in the redemption script. Exaggerated assumptions about an author’s capacity to control the meaning of his or her life risk supporting an inflated sense of control or ‘missionary sense of purpose’, and reductive, black-and-white certainties easily lead to judgements on others in contradistinction to the narrative self: ‘views about the essential nature of “real criminals”’, for example (Maruna, 2001: 167).

In a world of ambiguous truths it is possible to acknowledge this problematic aspect of the redemption script at the same time as recognizing its demonstrated efficacy. The final section considers how that might support a more nuanced approach in narrative work with prisoners.

Conclusions: Narrative resilience and telling untellable stories

Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas has been read as a ‘warning of the catastrophic consequences that ensue when human beings close their eyes to the world they live in and seek refuge instead in conventional discursive structures masquerading as a set of eternal truths’ (Allan, 2011: 59). Certainty in the form of eternal truths feels like a safe place, particularly for those whose lives are insecure, and I do not underestimate the psychological challenge that managing insecurity or ambiguity poses (discussed for example by Van Marle and Maruna, 2010). The provision of certainty in the process of making sense is the great strength of the redemption script. The avoidance of ambiguity might be its Achilles’ heel, particularly given the complexity of many offenders’ lives.

The late Bertram Cohler (1991: 184) developed a psychological perspective on adversity and narrative resilience whereby ‘anticipated adversity provides the dramatic quality […] as the essential organizing principle of the life story, challenging a previously held sense of personal integration. Successful resolution of this tension reflects resilience to adversity.’ The ‘dramatic quality’ that inheres in the challenge raised by the dishonest Junker to Michael Kohlhaas’s sense of integration in society creates a tension Kohlhaas cannot resolve until he is standing before his executioner; coherence in his personal narrative or script is achieved at the price of his life. That is rigid thinking; something widely perceived as a criminogenic factor (McClinton, 2009). Cohler’s model, by contrast, requires a capacity to revise one’s script. Narrative resilience, then, is also narrative flexibility. Kohlhaas himself cannot see the alternative positions available to him (as Othello – for example – does not); but the story is structured or told, by Kleist and then by Atanassow, in such a way that the reader/actor/audience can. That enables a reflexive process by which, in the words of Uwe, an actor in aufBruch’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, ‘you learn to deal with situations differently’ (Theater aufBruch, 1998).

Flexibility requires choices (I cannot realistically shift my position unless there is an alternative position available to me). Hagberg, anticipating to some extent the work of Kidd and Castano, has described a quality of literary fiction that might help not only prisoners to ‘deal with situations differently’. According to Hagberg, in engaging with literary narratives we

identify with the character in his or her context of action […] in such a way that we(a)learn what it is, what it means, to perform expressive actions that evince belief in this highly particular way, (b) learn what it is like to be the kind of person who holds these narrated beliefs […] and (c) see the narrated fictional content as a rather grand metaphor for our own real or possible life-circumstances. (2010: 126, emphases in original)

I have argued that both Kleist’s novella and its version by Theater aufBruch for Tegel prison not only foreground thematic paradoxes – a criminal quest for justice, an unjustified redemption – but also engage readers/performers/audiences structurally in the negotiation of competing or contradictory stories. Their sense of control is thereby challenged; but they are simultaneously offered release from the rigid ‘cognitive distortions’ required for that sense of control (Maruna, 2001: 9), which find expression in black-and-white, good-or-bad thinking: the ‘pleasant lies’ of dominant discourse.

David Gadd (2003: 318) noted of Maruna’s interviewees that ‘those who succeed in negotiating positive change are also those who retell their stories through multiple, contradictory discourses’. Exploring multiple, contradictory discourses might, then, be a more effective narrative path to change than a heavy focus on controlling or ‘making’ sense. Challenging the clear-cut distinction between primary and secondary desistance, Sam King (2013: 150) has submitted that the desistance literature fails to acknowledge ‘that individuals might be able to achieve what is commonly identified as “secondary desistance” while still retaining certain characteristics or behaviours which may have been prominent during the “offender” or “primary desistance” phases of the self’. Accounts that privilege the notion of a ‘consistent self’

are unlikely to be able to explain how individuals might maintain desistance when faced with situations that challenge their narratives. Moreover, these accounts do not allow for the possibility that individuals might be able to act in ways which are contrary to the narratives that they are constructing, and the identities which they are attempting to acquire, and yet still maintain desistance from crime. (King, 2013: 153)

Literary fiction cannot any more than small-group narrative therapy provide a failsafe recipe for maintaining a good life post-release. But literary fiction’s representation of the normal human condition as good and bad (rather than good or bad) responds to King’s and Yardley et al.’s concerns in that it acknowledges the potential for bad behaviour even in those who have chosen good behaviour. In sidestepping the ‘pleasant lies’ (Maruna, 2001: 145) of dominant discourse, literature models a less reductive and therefore less brittle narrative mode which might support resilience. Instead of asserting essential differences, a narrative like Kohlhaas challenges me with the idea that I might be both the same as and different from its criminal/heroic protagonist. The complex or ambiguous narratives found in literary fiction avoid the reductiveness of conventional certainties; they provide reflexive flexibility in place of a redemption circumscribed by the limitations of ‘us-and-them’ thinking.

That seems of particular value in the context of offender narratives. Sandberg follows Goffman (1963) when he suggests that offenders perceive themselves as stigmatized, find their actions in conflict with social codes and expectations (which are also self-expectations) and tend to inhabit subcultures as well as being subject to mainstream culture – and must therefore narratively negotiate conflicting stories more than most (Sandberg, 2010: 459). Paradoxically, they are simultaneously subject to (or the objects of) reductive labelling: ‘part of the actor’s problem with labeling is that others deny him/her his/her stories altogether, constructing him/her instead as unidimensional’ (Presser, 2009: 188).

This, in essence, was Maruna’s starting point in Making Good, and he demonstrated clear benefits when tellers can be permitted (rather than denied) their stories. But that does not solve the problem of how narratively to negotiate the complex, contradictory, shifting realities of lives that in the terms of black-and-white discourse make for untellable stories. Conventional storytelling will probably seek to reduce the complexity and deny the contradictions; Maruna cites Foote and Frank on Foucauldian power to support the notion that the reductiveness of the redemption script is a regrettable inevitability: ‘The social availability of preferred stories, and the assimilation of experience to these narratives, is how power works. (Maruna's emphasis) The power of the dominant discourse is to include some stories as tellable and exclude others as marginal and abnormal’ (Foote and Frank, 1999: 177; cited in Maruna, 2001: 8–9). At the same time, I submit, the peculiar ‘power’ of literary fiction is its capacity to contain complexity and contradictions, to represent the marginal and abnormal as a paradoxically central and familiar element in human experience, and thereby to tell the untellable. This too may be of relevance in narrative work with offenders.