Abstract
This chapter approaches human communicators as narrators and begins by reflecting on the various ways that humans have historically used narrative to ‘re-present’ time, space, and identity. It then considers Walter Fisher’s ‘narrative paradigm’, which characterises human beings as storytellers first and foremost. It explores Fisher’s analysis of the Ronald Reagan presidency of the United States in the 1980s and compares this to the simple yet successful storytelling underpinning Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. It then examines how some of the basic premises of Fisher’s narrative paradigm have been taken up by scholars in the field of environmental studies. This chapter concludes by examining the digital production of narratives and emerging forms of interactive and transmedia storytelling.
If the narrative paradigm celebrates anything, it celebrates human beings, and it does this by reaffirming their nature as storytellers.
—(Fisher 1989: 56)
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Notes
- 1.
A related term is ‘plot’, which is ‘the chain of causation’ linking events (Cobley 2014: 5).
- 2.
Carey (2009: 21) similarly argues that ‘one must examine communication, even scientific communication, even mathematical expression, as the primary phenomena of experience’.
- 3.
For example, Carl Jung used the concept of ‘archetypes’ (what he originally called ‘primordial images’) to suggest the existence of universal thought patterns that are shared across different cultures. He suggested that these could be found in religious sermons, myths, and even in art. Jung described three varieties of archetype: archetypal events (such as birth, death, initiation rituals, and marriage); archetypal figures (such as the mother, the father, the child, the wise old man, the wise old woman, the trickster, and the hero); and finally, archetypal motifs (such as the apocalypse, the deluge, and the creation).
- 4.
It is worth noting that from the seventeenth century onwards, the word ‘rhetoric’ was increasingly used pejoratively, such as when a politician’s speech was described as ‘empty rhetoric’. Similarly, the American poet Ezra Pound once described rhetoric as ‘the art of dressing up some unimportant matter so as to fool the audience for the time being’ (1970: 83).
- 5.
Incidentally, Fisher is not alone in arguing that human decision-making involves a lot more than logic and traditional rationality. For example, in his book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994), the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues that emotions play a very important role in human decision-making, despite long being thought of as ‘impediments’ to this process. In outlining what he calls the ‘neurobiology of rationality’ (p. 85), Damasio argues that emotion and reason are not isolated functions of the human brain.
- 6.
A related term is ‘verisimilitude’, which is the appearance of being true or credible. Rather like Fisher’s notion of ‘fidelity’, Cobley (2014) suggests that verisimilitude is largely a matter of human expectation and understanding. For example, categorising books and movies into ‘genres’ (e.g., horror, romance, crime, etc.) enables audiences to ‘expect’ certain things of them. Cobley gives the example of the genre ‘musicals’ to explain verisimilitude: ‘When somebody bursts into song during a musical, this is not, according to the rules of that particular genre, an indecorous act at odds with the statements in the text; instead, the song is part of a specific regime of verisimilitude and falls within a range of expectations on the part of the audience that such acts, while extremely infrequent in real life, are legitimate within the bounds of the genre’.
- 7.
Consequently, as Naomi Klein (2017) advises, a key strategy for those who wish to defeat ‘Trumpism’ must be to create and circulate alternative stories.
- 8.
It is important to add here that while deGrasse Tyson’s communicative approach to science may well provide a useful illustration of the narrative paradigm, the famed astrophysicist is something of a divisive figure and is the subject of accusations of sexual misconduct by four women in the United States. (My thanks to Bethany Klein for this important observation.)
- 9.
In Chap. 2, I noted that the response to climate change in Ireland has involved setting up a special government committee but also a ‘citizens’ assembly’, both of which have fed into the government’s Climate Action Plan. Fisher would say that such actions are an acknowledgement that so-called experts are not always right and do not know everything: ‘This is what is implied by the commonplace that everyone has “common sense”, and this is what makes it reasonable to have juries of laypersons and to have popular elections…’ (Fisher 1987: 68).
- 10.
- 11.
‘The reasonable person is committed to justice and this commitment ensures that such progress will be humane…’ (Fisher 1987: 128).
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O’Boyle, N. (2022). Narrators: A Narrative Approach to Human Communication. In: Communication Theory for Humans. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02450-4_3
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