Abstract
‘In the current age of terror and increasing polarization of world politics’, observes Hanna Meretoja in The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible, ‘the need to perceive the world from a plurality of perspectives has become as pressing as ever’ (p. 125). This groundbreaking monograph explores the power of literature to help readers imagine possible worlds of the past, present and future.
Of course, storytelling has not always been put to noble purposes; fiction can just as easily serve to reinforce stereotypes and oppressive narratives. Recent decades have seen a lively debate among literary theorists over whether narratives are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for us. Meretoja warns against idealizing narratives, offering instead a nuanced analysis of ‘the uses and abuses of narrative for life’ (to quote the title of Chapter 4). She shows how storytelling ‘can perpetuate dominant social power structures’, but also ‘how it can be an empowering means of resistance’ (p. 25). It all depends on how the reader interprets the text.
This is an ambitious, multifaceted study, which succeeds well at its broader aim ‘to show how literature can be a source of ethical insight in exploring the relationship between narrative and human existence’ (p. 30). Meretoja is a scholar of comparative literature and her interdisciplinary approach productively integrates narrative studies, narrative ethics, narrative philosophy, narrative psychology and cultural memory studies. In this way, the book makes an original contribution to narrative theory, while never losing sight of real readers in the real world. Of particular interest for memory studies scholars are the book’s analyses of literary representations of the Holocaust, the discussion of the role of cultural memory, and the argument regarding the ethical value of fictional depictions of implication and complicity.
The material for this study consists of several literary texts in German, French and Hebrew from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (all of which, with the exception of the Hebrew ones, Meretoja reads in the original language). These works are autobiographical or fictional (and, in some cases, autobiographical fiction), including examples of ‘perpetrator fiction’ and ‘complicity fiction’. All of them depict in various ways traumatic experiences of war, loss and grief. They also explore, in various ways, storytelling as a theme. Meretoja’s close readings elucidate how narratives work on two levels: within the fictional world depicted in the text, and in the meeting between the text and the reader.
The method applied here is narrative hermeneutics, which Meretoja describes ‘as a philosophically and text-analytically rigorous approach that cultivates an ethos of dialogue’ (p. 25). She expands narrative hermeneutics to take into account ‘power relations, specific modes of situatedness, and the unequal distribution of agency and vulnerability’ (p. 10). Meretoja’s approach acknowledges that neither texts nor readers exist in a vacuum; rather, they are inevitably enmeshed in larger webs of cultural and political narratives. Interpretation can never be separated from the surrounding world, comprising ‘an endless activity of (re)orientation, engagement, and sense-making, which is thoroughly worldly’ (p. 10).
Chapter 1 addresses overarching questions about the ethical underpinnings of storytelling and introduces the various interdisciplinary strands of the book. Chapter 2 focuses on narrative hermeneutics, in which narrative is understood not only as an object, but also a mode of interpretation. Narrative is defined by Meretoja as a ‘culturally mediated practice of sense-making that involves the activities of interpreting and presenting someone’s experience in a specific situation to someone from a certain perspective or perspectives as part of a meaningful, connected account’ (p. 48). The hermeneutic approach takes the constantly ongoing human activity of interpretation (whether conscious or automatized) as key to understanding not only narratives, but all aspects of human experience. Meretoja argues that narrative hermeneutics offers the following advantages for the study of how stories relate to life and ethics: (1) it allows us to see the relation between narratives and lived experience as neither identical nor opposed, but part of the same continuum; (2) it emphasizes that we understand life through a non-linear, often messy process of interpretation and reinterpretation and (3) it reveals a dialogical relationship between overarching cultural narratives and individuals who are enmeshed in them.
The ethical dimensions of stories are the focus of Chapter 3. Here Meretoja outlines the ethical potential of narratives, arguing that they (1) expand our sense of the possible, (2) encourage self-understanding, (3) encourage understanding of others, (4) open up spaces for social interaction, in which an interpretative dialogue can occur, (5) offer new perspectives and (6) provide a means of ethical inquiry. The latter point is especially pertinent within narrative hermeneutics, which holds that stories can never be devoid of ethical perspectives. This chapter develops a framework for narrative analysis that takes into account both the ethical potential and the risks of storytelling, differentiating between narratives that ‘expand or diminish our sense of the possible’ (p. 89). Meretoja traces a continuum between what she terms subsumptive narrative practices, which tend to reinforce stereotypes and dominant worldviews (often employing a monological mode), and non-subsumptive narrative practices, which serve to challenge the same (often through a dialogical mode). She argues that ‘interdisciplinary narrative studies would benefit from systematically acknowledging the continuum from appropriative subsumptive to non-subsumptive narrative practices, animated by the ethos of dialogue’ (p. 295). One of the strengths of Meretoja’s argument is that these functions are understood as contextual, that is, resulting from ‘what narratives do to us and what we do with them as we engage with them in specific situations’ (p. 295).
The analytical tools developed in Chapter 3 are applied in close readings of literary texts in the subsequent chapters, starting, in Chapter 4, with an examination of how both the empowering and annihilating potential of storytelling plays out on several levels of German author Julia Franck’s acclaimed novel Die Mittagsfrau (2007, published in English editions as The Blind Side of the Heart and The Blindness of the Heart). Its depiction of a mother who abandons her child ‘encourages us as readers to take the perspective of a character who does not fit received identity categories and to see the ethical complexity of her situation’ (p. 172). Meretoja shows how the protagonist’s sense of possibilities is first expanded by storytelling in reciprocal relationships with other characters, only to be closed off by the imposition of identities through oppressive narratives. Her ultimate muteness symbolizes a loss of agency within the specific historical context of Nazi Germany. Meretoja argues that this novel can be seen ‘as a moral laboratory that unsettles our preconceived categories of right and wrong’ (p. 172).
In Chapter 5, Meretoja reads German writer Günter Grass’ novel Hundejahre (1963, Dog Years) and autobiography Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006, Peeling the Onion). Hundjahre is the third novel in Grass’ Danzig trilogy, which solidified his reputation as the moral consciousness of the postwar generation. Four decades later, his autobiography sparked controversy with Grass’ confession that he served in the Waffen-SS at the age of 17. Meretoja poses the question of whether this revelation compromises the ethical value of Grass’ previous fiction, concluding that his fictional and autobiographical works offer different but complementary perspectives on life in Nazi Germany. Of particular interest here is Meretoja’s analysis of a dual perspective in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, which ‘foregrounds the tension between the experience of those at the scene of the action, immersed in the course of events, and the perspective of those looking back and retrospectively narrativizing the events’ (p. 191). The retrospective mode of narration, she argues, prompts readers to imagine themselves in similar situations and reflect on ethical issues in our own world, such as responsibility and complicity.
Chapter 6 opens with the observation that fictional depictions of the Holocaust from the perspective of the perpetrators have long been taboo, due to a fear they would humanize the perpetrators and encourage readers to empathize and even identify with them. This helps to explain the controversy surrounding Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes (2006, The Kindly Ones), in which the first-person narrator is a former SS officer. Meretoja acknowledges that perpetrator fiction presents us with ethical challenges, but holds that it is precisely by doing so that it has the potential to deepen our understanding of historical atrocities. She argues that Littell’s novel does two things simultaneously, encouraging ‘emotional engagement’ and ‘producing critical distance’ (p. 219).
Chapter 7 focuses on the dialogical aspect of storytelling through a reading of two works by Israeli author David Grossman: To the End of the Land (2010, Isha Borachat Mi’bsora, 2008) and Falling Out of Time (2015, Nofel mi-huts la-zeman, 2011). Unlike the works of Franck, Grass, and Littell, which are all set during the Second World War, these works deal with the present, yet, as Meretoja notes, ‘their narratives unfold under the shadow of a series of wars and disasters from the Holocaust to the present’ (p. 255). The analysis shows how these works represent three kinds of dialogue: our internal dialogues with ourselves, external dialogues with others and dialogues with the cultural narratives that shape us. Meretoja concludes that Grossman depicts dialogue as nonsubsumptive, in that it is characterized by ‘receptivity, responsiveness, and openness’ (p. 270). At the same time, Grossman also explores the limits of storytelling through depictions of moments when dialogue breaks down.
A central claim of this book is that ‘narratives do not merely represent reality, but take part in shaping it’ (p. 90). Meretoja’s masterful study inspires optimism about the role of fiction as a mode of ethical inquiry. ‘A sense of the possible’, she argues, ‘is integral to the moral agency and to the ethical imagination of individuals and communities. It has transformative potential’ (p. 4). As the theoretical arguments and astute readings in The Ethics of Storytelling show, literary works can engage readers in imagining possible worlds, and perhaps even lead them to change the world they inhabit for the better.