No Place Like Home; or, Dwelling in Narrative

Laura Bieger

aving survived all of her adventures in Oz, Dorothy finally

learns the secret of the ruby red slippers: theres no place like
home. And as she grapples with the meaning of this phrase,
repeating it over and over, she literally calls home into existence: her
speech act directly transports her back to her aunt and uncles farm
in Kansas. There is, indeed, no place like home unless we call it, and
there is no reason to do so unless it seems uncertain. Yet what exactly
is being conveyed here? That there is no place like home, a plea for
its quasi-religious exclusiveness? Or that there is no place like home,
a sanctioning of its elusiveness or even sheer absence? No matter how
one twists and turns the meaning of this phrase, there is a haunting
sense that home may be forever gone, or, once seen from Oz, may never
have existed. The narrative productivity unleashed by this uncertainty
is the topic of this essay.
In addressing the intimate and immensely productive relation of
belonging and narrative, I am concerned with belonging as an existential condition of human being, and with narrative as the quintessential
mediator and enabler of that condition. What links the two is the yearning at work in and through belongingnot just be-ing, but longing,
the desire for a place in the world without which both place and world
would crumble.1 And yet, to feel and direct this longing we need a
mediating structure; narrative is that structure. Just think of the many
people who write diaries in times of trouble and stop once things have
smoothened out; or think of the inner monologue that sets in when
realizing that one is lost. In thus pairing belonging and narrative, I am
interested in narrative as a fundamental constituent of human being
a cultural resource of orientation and emplacement that sustains our
being through its capacities to articulate unsettling experiences; to
conduct the semantic, psychic, and geographic movements unleashed
by them within the shifting parameters of space and time; and in due
process to give meaning and mooring to life by giving narrative form.
Matters of belonging are today most rigorously debated in the
contexts of transnationalism, postcolonialism, and queer and gender

New Literary History, 2015, 46: 1739

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studies, usually to the end of highlighting and problematizing states of

troubled belonging caused by experiences of migration, diaspora, or
sexual discrimination. These debates have brought out the centrality of
these experiences in the formation of modern cultures, and they have
been crucial in replacing notions of belonging as set (and saturated)
in stable (and unjustly distributed) correlations of place and self with
an understanding of belonging as inherently fabricated and provisional.
Salman Rushdies imaginary homelands, Homi Bhabhas third space,
Mary Louise Pratts contact zones, Paul Gilroys black Atlantic, Iain
Chamberss impossible homecomings, and James Cliffords preference
of routes over roots programmatically capture this critical impetus.
I have learned much from these debates, and I fully subscribe to their
insistence on the tenuous, quintessentially performative nature of belonging and owe a large debt to their bringing out its contested, often
precarious relation to space, place, and gender, its nostalgic inclinations,
and its cosmopolitan potential. For my own purposes, however, the
(identity) political framework of these debates is limiting. Rather than
focusing on particular sets of experiences, their proper recognition, and
their capacity to resist hegemonic renderings of belonging (the national
homeland, the nuclear family), I want to approach belonging as an
anthropological premise of narration. This essay is, then, an attempt to
talk about the means and ends of a relentless productivity that, in engendering and continuously revising the narrative frames and formulas
by which we live, participates in what Jacques Rancire has called the
aesthetic politics of distributing the sensible.2
Thus understood, narrative becomes an indispensible component of
dwelling in the world, a proposition with far-reaching consequences for
our understanding of narrativity (and encouraging sympathy for a Heideggerian notion of dwelling as a hermeneutical practice, about which I
will have more to say). To this day, most narrative theories are formalist
or structuralist, and with their sharp focus on operational units, basic
patterns, and systematic regulations, they have boldly illuminated our
understanding of narrativity.3 What these theorizations have neglected,
however, are narratives dynamic, inherently progressive qualities (its
unfolding over time, its being directed across space and toward a receptive listener), and in doing so, they have bracketed those means and
ends that characterize and motivate narrative as a human activity that
can be found in any culture. Anthropologically minded approaches,
few as there arethose of Peter Brooks and Paul Ricoeur may come to
minddo ask about narrative means and ends, mostly regarding their
capacities to create models of understanding.4 But these approaches

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tend to confine their interrogations of this use to matters of human

temporalitythe problem of time-boundedness and the impossibility of
understanding the meaning of ones deathat the cost of either ignoring or dismissing the intricate ways in which this human activity is also
invested in matters of space.5
Building on and yet departing from these latter theories, an understanding of narrativity based on the human need to belong brings space
into playnot by dismissing narratives function as a mode of understanding human temporality, but by insisting that human existence is
equally bound up in space and time, forced to wrestle with the unutterable
mobility and contingency of space-timea task for which it turns to narrative.6 Much of our storytelling vocabulary is, indeed, strikingly spatial;
we speak of situations, expositions, plots, and arrivals. But narratives
relation to space is not merely metaphorical. Storytelling presupposes
emplacement. It reaches out across space, unfolds spatial imaginaries
without which it would be incomprehensible, takes place in particular
settings, and can have transformative effects on them. Only recently have
scholars begun to explore the intimate relation of space and narrative
that becomes tangible hereby analyzing the spatial metaphors and
semantics evoked and employed by narrative; by developing the idea of
narrative space into an analytical tool akin to that of narrative time;
by approaching narrative space as a particular kind of physical space
(the theatrical stage, exhibition space); and by unraveling the narrative
dimension of the spaces conceived by architects, landscapists, urban
planners. 7
Curiously absent from these explorations, however, are concerns with
the conceptual territory where physical space meets narrative action. If
current work on space departs from the assumption that it has been
released from its role as a stable backdrop for the dynamic operations
of time, that it has itself become productive in the wake of the spatial
turn, how does this new productivity of space intersect with that of
narrativeespecially when understood not primarily as the impersonal
work of reality-forming structures, but as a human activity mobilized
through an existential uncertainty? And if the meaning of ones death
is doomed to remain impenetrable by even the boldest, most rigorous
hermeneutical efforts (and thus is likely to serve as a one-dimensional
yet persistent motor force of narration), what can we say about narratives investment in human space-boundedness, its place-making and
dwelling capacities?

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Ontological Narrativity and Narrative Agency

Rethinking narrativity along these lines contests the notion of narrative as a stable backdrop to the messiness of life that still prevails in
literary and cultural scholarship today. Approached in the traditional
way, narratives capacity to mend a troubled sense of belonging was
strictly retrospective. Categorically removed from life, narrative elucidates
what already has been lived; in fact, it can function as a basic form of
human understanding precisely because it re-creates (and thus recovers)
life from a safe distance not unlike the sheltered space of therapeutic
treatment. Contesting this basic assumption, scholars from a variety of
different fields (many of them in the social sciences) have recently come
to claim something much more substantive about narrative: namely,
that . . . [it] is an ontological condition of social life. Leveling the strict
division of life and narrative erected by representational narrativity, they
posit that stories guide action; that people construct identities (however
multiple and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a
repertoire of emplotted stories; that experience is constituted through
narratives; . . . and that people are guided to act in certain ways, and
not others, on the basis of the projections, expectations, and memories
derived from a multiplicity but ultimately limited repertoire of available
. . . narratives.8 Hence studies of action and agency are urged to engage
with the thought that everything we know, from making families, to
coping with illness, to carrying out strikes and revolutions is at least in
part a result of numerous cross-cutting relational story-lines in which
social actors find or locate themselves.9
Margaret Somers, whom I am quoting here, is among the leading
proponents of and most lucid commentators on what has often been
called the narrative turn in the social sciencesthe development of
an ontological narrativity that is the conceptual trademark of this recent
turn has not yet received the attention that it deserves from scholars
of literature and culture.10 But I am turning to Somerss work here for
yet another, more particular reason: the cross-cutting story-lines that
orchestrate social relations are strikingly spatial, as is her entire relational and network approach. Assessing these same relations from the
perspective of human geography, Doreen Massey insists that they always
have a spatial form and spatial content: they exist, necessarily, both in
space (i.e., in a locational relation to other social phenomena) and across
space. Defining social space as the vast complexity of the interlocking
and articulating nets of social relations, for her, a place is formed
out of the particular set of social relations, which interact at a particular
location while the singularity of any individual place is formed in part

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21

out of the specificity of the interactions which occur at that location . . .

and in part out of the fact that the meeting of those social relations
at that location . . . will in turn produce new social effects.11 Read in
tandem with Somers, these effects seem to stem to a significant degree
from the available repertoire of storylines in which social actors locate
themselveswhich also means that narrative becomes a primary agent
in the production of space and place.12
This is not the place to fully unpack these correlations. I mention
them because I have come to think that there is an epistemic interaction
between the untying of space from its conception as a stable backdrop
to the dynamic operations of time, and the untying of narrative from
its conception as a representational backdrop to the messiness of life.
Both turns, it seems to me, are stirred by what Michel Foucault has
described as a shift from the epoch of time to that of spacean epoch in
which our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing
through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects
with its own skein.13 But how exactly are these pointsamong them our
own physical beingexperienced as connected? And what is the role that
narrative plays in this? Tied back to the relentless productivity that stems
from the human need to belong, the historical discourse and imagination that peak in the nineteenth century must be seen as responding
to a world made uncertain through the loss of providential plots and
feudalistic orders by investing in narratives representational capacities.14 I
will return to this historical argument in the following section; suffice it
to say for now that the spatial discourse and imagination gaining shape
at the end of the last century demanded new frames for the task of
narrative recoveryand found them in an ontologically enhanced relation
of life and narrative.15 In fact, the new epoch (or episteme) ascribed
proactive building capacities to a human activity that had previously been
thought of as merely restorative.
The recent narrative turn in psychology may very well be the most
powerful token of this development.16 For Kenneth and Mary Gergen, two
of its leading proponents, the present analysis stops short of saying that
lives are narrative events. . . . Stories are, after all, forms of accounting,
and it seems misleading to equate the account with its putative object.
However, narrative accounts are embedded within social action. Events
are rendered socially visible through narratives, and they are typically used
to establish expectations for future events.17 I find this line of argument
highly compelling, especially in its care to preserve the line that would
prevent life from being fully absorbed by narrative. And yet, because
of the immersion of narrative in the events of daily life, these events will
become laden with a storied sense. Events will acquire the reality of a

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beginning, a climax, a low point, an ending, and so on. People will

live out the events in such a way that they and others will index them in
just this way. And this is where art enters the Gergens scenario. The
stories by which we live are taken more or less directly from the artistic
realm, not as life copying art, but as art becoming the vehicle through
which the reality of life is generated. In a significant sense, then, we live
by storiesboth in the telling and the doing of self (NS 18).
The notion of art implied here is not further spelled out, but I think
that the sociocultural end of creating narrative scripts for everyday
life demands a broad, reception-based understandingart as a separate
realm to which we are drawn because it invites us to experience its objects without pragmatic consequence (there is no need to call the police
when reading about a mass murderer in a novel), and thus aesthetically.
But the stories by which we live are not only thoroughly pervaded by
all those artistic and often fictional narratives that we consume in the
form of novels, memoirs, comics, and other graphic narratives, narrative cinema, serial television, certain computer games, etc.; they notably
gravitate toward these artistic forms. Counterintuitive as it may seem,
narrative art is, indeed, deeply invested in matters of belonging. Removed from the messiness of life (and thus committed to representing
rather than living it), it stages and explores belongings narrative drive
as a life-sustaining need to tell: to interpret ones surroundings and
express ones being in relation to them, hoping that someone out there
is listening. In fact, one striking and important way in which concerns
with belonging play out in narrative art is by giving voice and form to
different kinds of narrative agencywhich I tentatively define as the
capacity to make choices about the telling of ones story and to impose
them on the world. Think, for instance, of the kind of agency asserted
though letter writing in early novels or of the authority of conversation
in realist texts. Such agency cannot, of course, exist in a vacuum; it takes
shape against the backdrop of strikingly distinctivewith Bakhtin, one
may say chronotopicconjunctions of spatial and psychic imaginaries. One way of approaching narrative art would be, then, to find out
how it stages and explores different modes of narrative agency as they
evolve from and affect the inner and outer worlds in which belonging
is sought. From such a perspective, narrative art expresses, gives form
to, and makes available to experience what would otherwise be diffuse
and mute.
This articulation effect is framed by given sets of conventions and
thus condemned to reiterating the norms and values inscribed into
them.18 But giving account of uncertain states of belonging also and just
as inevitably entails a wrestling with the unsayable that pushes narrative

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23

production toward and across the limits of the sayable at a given place
and time. This inbuilt drive toward exposing and transgressing its own
conventionality plays out with particular force in the depragmatized
realm of artwith the effect of constantly revising the narrative frames
and formulas by which we live, of engendering ever-new life-forms
for the narrative pursuit of belonging.19 But not only literary production
must then be assumed as closely invested in matters of belonging. Indeed, it would follow that narratives are consumed out of concern about
ones proper place in the world; that people read to go on imaginary
journeys, not necessarily to get back home, but to familiarize themselves
with unknown modes of dwelling, to try out new forms of agency, and
to enhance their capacity to belong along the way.
Needless to say, this approach to narrative (and) art does not sit well
with the reading models developed in the spirit of ideology critique.
Literary texts are now (and especially in my field, American studies)
predominantly studied to determine how they are situated within larger
discursive fields, and how they participate in regulating the subject positions contained in them. Yet this interpretive framework comes at a
cost, for it presupposes a relation between a literary text and its reader
that is located, first and foremost, on a conceptual (or cognitive) level:
a resistant reception penetrates its object intellectually while affective
mobilization tends to be seen as manipulation. Aesthetic experience
thus tends to become a mere function of interpellation, and art produces aesthetic regimes that need to be understood to unravel them.20
Concerns with belonging question this critical paradigm in assuming a
narrative drive toward meaning and form that bears a genuinely messy
relation to ideologies of place and self. Any account of losing or regaining ones sense of belonging (no matter how idiosyncratic, incoherent,
and non-closural it may be) is ideologically tainted and constrained;
but, in arising out of social and psychic need, the act of account-giving
itself cannot be easily dismissed. In fact, even radical states of nonbelongingpolitically desirable as they may seemconstrue and make
sense of those states by narrative means.21
The prescriptive side of narrative is a familiar target in the resistance
paradigmas a subject-forming power to be exposed at almost any cost.
Yet while narrative is certainly inclined to bring disparate elements into
a socially intelligible (and thus at least somewhat coercive) whole, the
narrative operations propelled by the need to belong challenge established forms, since these forms are most likely of limited use to truly
articulate what seeks expression. And if this double-bind of coercion
and transgression is, indeed, a motor force of literary creativity, then the
narrative drive to express and give form becomes a primary means of

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tracing both concerns with and the limits of belonging at particular conjunctions of time, space, and social being. In confronting the resistance
paradigm (usually conceived as opposing the subject-forming power of
symbolic structures) with an interest in the need to tell that operates in
and through these structures, the experiential dimension inherent to
any regimic mode of distributing the sensibleits ecstatic involvement
with making and unmaking these structuresgains critical weight.22

The Subject of Belonging

But ontological narrativity is surely a contestable idea, so let me say
a few more words about this designation. According to Stephen White,
whom I want to follow here for a moment, the sense of uncertainty
brought about by the crisis of post- or late modernity has affected many
of those things taken for granted in the modern West. The recent turn
to ontology may, then, very well be the result of a growing propensity
to interrogate more carefully those entities presupposed by our typical
ways of seeing and doingparticularly the enlightened idea of the
human subject sustained by the familiar subscriptions to its self-reliant
and socially disengaged autonomy.23 Ontological commitments growing out of the waning certainty about the Teflon constitution of the
modern subject seek to replace it with a stickier one, with the effect
of giving more relevance to questions of its dependency on the natural,
social, and cultural world. Conceiving this subject through its existentially
imposed and narratively sustained need to belong is precisely such a
commitment, driven by questions of how we articulate the meaning of
our lives, both individually and collectively, and how these articulations
matter (SA 4).24
For White, such commitments go hand-in-hand with a shift from
strong to weak ontologiesontologies that, rather than positing
foundations of human being whose validity is categorically unchanging
and of universal reach, operate upon a basic set of conceptualizations
that are at once fundamental and contestable. Instead of positing fixed
ideas of human nature or telos, they present context-bound figurations of human being in terms of certain existential realities; yet while
these realities are in some brute sense universal constituents of human
being, their meaning is, even when analyzed in the most clearly defined
correlations, categorically indeterminable: no matter how closely we
scrutinize language, life, or death, we will not find a discernible essence
or terminal meaning (SA 9). From the perspective of belonging, these
realities may best be described as our existential boundedness in time

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25

and space; our wrestling with the unutterable mobility and contingency
of space-time, with sustaining life and facing death by narrative means.
My contestable claim about the narrative productivity of belonging is,
then, that it springs from diffuse, sometimes subterranean, sometimes
blatantly obvious feelings of uncertainty about our mutually dependent
sense of self and place, or life and deaththe eerie feeling, reminiscent
of an existential vulnerability, that we are, indeed, weak and mortaland
that narrative action is imperative if life is to remain meaningful. The
ways in which we feel weak and mortal are, of course, never fully articulable, just as they change over space and time, place and lifespan. But
modern life has unmoored these feelings, and in doing so it has boosted
the narrative productivity of belonging. For when the old gatekeepers
of certainty (such as feudalism and theology) lost their coercive powers, narrative offered itself as an effective tool to counteract the vastly
multiplying, accelerating, and often persistent feelings of uncertainty
that an individual then had to face. An increased and increasingly
metamorphosing narrative productivity has thus been generated as the
articulating, structuring, and implementing agent of belonging.
The etymological history of belonging bears some remarkable traces
of these developments. At first strictly used in the substantive plural to
refer to objects of possessionmy belongingsin the mid-eighteenth
century, this use of the term was complemented by the abstract singular
belongingdenoting the existential, emotional state that is central to
my line of argument. This semantic drift away from substantive, unilateral
claims of ownership (and, by extension, of ones proper place in the
world) points toward a profound restructuring in the social organization
of property. In the emerging market economy, material possessions began
to take on a supplementary rather than a stabilizing function; they were
perpetually consumed rather than securely possessed. In this situation,
belonging assumes a new meaningto belongwhich testifies to an
increased need to make use of the verbal capacity to bind and cohere.
This capacity is, indeed, further amplified by the fact that the new verb
is intransitive; it reaches out and moves toward something (a place, a
person) to become complete, and is thus an obvious tool for orientation.25 With these new meanings, belonging becomes a relative rather than
an absolute marker of position, and hence inherently deictic; indeed,
the semantic incompleteness that it now bears enhances belongings
strategic relation to narrative.
Again, narratives underacknowledged relation to space offers itself
as a viable trajectory along which to further substantiate these ideas.
Following Edward Soja, I take the recurring recomposition[s] of spacetime-being in their concrete forms that are the result of modernization

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as constitutive of the ever-shifting, heterogeneous fabric of social being

that Soja calls modernity.26 From this notion of modernity as modernization and modernization as a dynamic compound of temporal, spatial,
and social forces, it is just a small step to assuming that the perpetual
transformations thus unleashed are conducted to a substantive extent
through narrative. To reiterate and expand upon an argument made
earlier in this essay: if space is quintessentially produced in the constantly
shifting interplay of social actions that the spatial turn has brought to
our attention, then the recent turn toward ontological narrativity asks
us to think of these actions as deeply pervaded by and substantially
conducted through narrative. Turning to Henri Lefebvres influential
idea that space is perpetually produced in the interplay of conceiving/
administering it, perceiving it, and living/representing it, narrative
(although unmentioned by Lefebvre) must be deemed indispensable:
in architectural planning, legal discourse, building instructions, and so
forth; in the manifold processes of cognitive mapping, especially the basic
correlation of perceptions and memories; and in the tales, images, and
practices that charge space with habitual, symbolic, or ritualistic value,
and that are hence essential to making it meaningful and familiar.27
Which brings me back to the issue of narrative agency: modernizations
frequent recomposition of time, space, and social being has turned this
agency into a crucial skilland, respectively, into a highly desirable good
for cultural consummation and consumption. And yet I dont mean to
suggest that modernity has invented belonging; rather, modernity laid
open a fundamental uncertainty in the condition of human existence
that was formerly covered up by the coercive epistemologies of religion
and feudalism, and that is now turned into the source of a relentless
imaginary and narrative productivity. Under the impact of these transformations, belonging was thoroughly mobilized, inclined to build
ever-new homes, often by turning inward rather than outward, attaching
itself to a series of homes rather than to just one that is thought to be
singular and irreplaceable. This also means, however, that modern life
has gradually dematerialized the modalities of belonging, shifting them
away from beloved and presumably stable landscapes, dwellings, and
social bonds; away from a soil that has been cultivated by ones family
for generations; away from durable, secure possessions, from struggles
over ownership and dispossessionand toward the world of letters and
the imagination that brings this world to life.28
Let me modify these claims by saying they are at once vastly general
and decidedly limited: my argument is, first and foremost, an argument
about the changing function of narrative in the ever-changing fabric of
modern life. Concretely, I suggest that within the uneven continuum

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of modernity, the advent of Neuzeit marks a watershed moment in the

narrative productivity of belonging in the Western world. Usually dated
around the time of the Renaissance and associated with events such as
the discovery of America, the rise of individualism, and the emergence
of global trade systems, instrumental reason, and the enlightened formation of knowledge, it profoundly challenged established ideas about
human beingwith the effect of creating a radically increased need for
orientation and emplacement. In this situation, narrative productivity
pluralized and leaped to unprecedented heights, causing a sheer explosion of narrative, whether in fiction, history, philosophy, or any of the
social sciences, dethroning theology and establishing history as the key
discourse and central imagination (RP 56). The emerging pertinence
of historical storytelling is, indeed, a powerful token of narratives altered
function in the modern world, a development that was notably driven
by a loss of providential plots and their capacity to settle doubts about
the existential constituents of human being. It absorbed, as Hayden
White has so forcefully argued, the basic modes and conventions of
literary storytelling, thus structurally blurring the line between factual
and fictional narration in its scientific quest for meaning.29
The other significant change occurred in the realm of deliberate literary
storytelling, most notably through the emerging form of the novel. The
story of the novel as modernitys paradigmatic literary form has often
been told; in fact, it is deeply ingrained into the history of modernity
itself. For Walter Benjamin, its rise bears testimony to an emerging state
of alienation, brought forth by the capitalist rationalization of work
routines; the resulting death of oral (and thus communal) storytelling
solidifies this unfortunate state.30 Arguing along similar lines, Georg
Lukcs sees in the novel the quintessential expression of a transcendental
homelessness, the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God,
of an age in which . . . the immanence of meaning in life has become
a problem.31 Its prototypical hero is a product of estrangement from
[an] outside world (TN 66) that has become internally heterogeneous
and fractured; the novel responds to this unhomely world by turning
the search for form into its primary artistic end, and it doing so, it
transforms itself into the normative being of becoming (TN 7273, my
emphasis). Mikhail Bakhtins approach, although diametrically opposed
in judgment, confirms these basic observations. For him, the novel is a
genre-in-the-making that we find in the vanguard of all modern literary
development.32 Its peculiar capacity for change stems from a very
specific rupture in the history of European civilization: its emergence
from a socially isolated and culturally deaf semipatriarchal society, and its
entrance into international and interlingual contacts and relationships

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(NE 11)in short, from the modernizing processes launched by Neuzeit.

That the novel is determined by experience, knowledge and practice
(the future) (NE 15) must have compelled an audience struggling with
a profound loss of familiarity and with finding new ways of doing and
making while facing a structurally uncertain future.
There is no need to venture further into this well-known debate; my
point about these three canonical histories of the novel should be sufficiently clear: they unanimously posit what may best be described as its
functional relation to modernity. For all of them, the new genre springs
from and articulates a quintessentially modern sense of instability, which
it sutures by means of its extraordinarily amendable capacities of narrative form-giving. A mechanically facilitated printing process, the rise
of an aspiring class of professional writers, and a fiction-hungry (largely
bourgeois and often female) audience paved the novels road to success,
soon turning its long, comparatively unrefined form of storytelling into
the most popular literary genre of the modern age. And yet there was
an initial suspicion of the seductive power on which the novel thrived.
Heated debates revolved around the unpredictable effects that reading
novels might have on the imagination. In fact, previously the imagination
had been strictly synonymous with mere illusion, just as fiction (which
mostly meant sentimental fiction at the time) had the reputation of
transporting its readers to make-believe worlds with the looming threat
of forever corrupting their sense of morals and reality. And yet a small
but influential group of writers began to claim that sentimental fiction
harboredprecisely because of the imaginative power that it evoked
vital capacities for creating a better society.33
At the same time, and directly influencing this latter development,
reconceptions of the human mind, particularly those written by John
Locke and David Hume, began to envision an autonomous psychic
realm in which the imagination assumed the status of a faculty.34 If
a fundamental riftuncomfortable in Locke and insurmountable in
Humewas now assumed to separate an individuals inner and outer
world, then the imagination became indispensible for the task of bridging that riftof correlating perceptions (sensory data stemming from
the outer world) with memories (sensory data stemming from the inner
world) to mediate present and past experience. I read the parallel success
stories of the novel and the imagination as a remarkable token of the
eras heighted stakes of orientationas involving a successful correlation
of perceptions and memories. In a situation in which the outer world
must have lost much of its familiar appearance (and perceptions were
almost by default strange and distorted), the newly designated faculty of
the imagination equipped the inner world (and thus the very site where

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29

memories and perceptions were to be meaningfully connected) with a

powerful yet precarious tool of recovery. When the novel emerged as
the preferred food for the imagination right around this time, it filled
these inner worlds with an endless array of stories about characters in
search of something that might give meaning and mooring to their
allegedly made-up lives. As we move through the nineteenth century
and beyond, ever-new genres and subgenres, artistic forms and devices
emerged from this narrative productivity, with visual storytelling (in
both still and moving images) becoming an increasingly pertinent and
creative force in this production.
That many of the new narrative art forms were serialized bears an
obvious attraction in light of the continuous need for narrative posited
here. Even more importantly, however, they are all offspring of the novel
in the basic sense of meeting the need to belong by giving form to narrative. In fact, in the long run, the novels structurally unrefined, endlessly
malleable mode of storytellingfor Lukcs, its normative being of becomingturned out so conducive for matters of belonging that it became
the main provider of those narrative frames and patterns needed for the
task of staying orientated, emplaced, and entertained in the modern
world. This last designation is not meant to imply a cheap compensation or flight into fantasy, but in the potentially constructive sense of
the German term Unterhaltung: to provide joyful compensation, valuable
exchange, and practical support. Yet does such a playful way of dealing with troubled life-worlds, even when understood in non-derogative
terms, not ultimately pervert the modern yearning to belong?35 The
answer depends on the anthropological premises on which the narrative
productivity unleashed by this yearning is assumed to rest.

Two Types of Lack (and Two Models of Narrativity)

Whether acknowledged or not, assumptions about human being
are at the bottom of any theorization of literature or culturewhich
is, even in the most radically formalist or antihumanist assessment of
its subject matter, bound up with the yearnings and activities of those
who use and produce it.36 Narrative theory is, of course, no exception.
And if my own approach assumes a fundamental yearning for narrative
that springs from an existential need to belong and makes human being incomplete without narrative, then two schools of thought lend
themselves to making sense of this basic constitution: psychoanalysis and
phenomenology. Both share the idea of an anthropological lack, but this
lack is conceived in different ways, with substantial consequences for the

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narrative activity generated by this lackespecially when it comes to its

building and dwelling capacities.
Narrative activity, according to psychoanalysis, springs from the
quasi-traumatic experience of losing an undifferentiated state of wholenessthe state of being one with the nurturing mother. As a relentless
desire (Peter Brooks even calls it a narrative desire) for something
irretrievably lost, narrative activity generates projections that range
from nostalgic regress to utopian transgression. It is, indeed, immensely
productive in this regard, a force that stirs us to imagine and to act in
order to make up for what is lacking.37 Indeed, the primordial experience of loss creates a sense of incompleteness that narrative seeks to
replenish: for Brooks, by engaging the rivaling forces (or desires) of
Eros and death drive for the basic operation of engendering plot. And if
narrative desire is ultimately the desire for the end (death, quiescence,
non-narratibility), then narration serves as the tool with which to plot
ones life toward [that] end under the compulsion of imposed delay
(RP 107).38 Read along these lines, Dorothys act of calling her home
into existence promises verbal eloquence and psychic enchantment,
but no material gratification. While maturing in matters of belonging
can then be conceived as an increasing capacity to transform material
need into psychic demand, the underlying need is never replenished; it
leaves memory traces that seek (or demand) realization in the realm
of the imaginaryin places like Oz (RP 55).
From a Lacanian perspective, these Oz-like places are imaginary in
troublesome ways: as phantasmatic images of wholeness, they reiterate
(and thus keep alive) the primal scene of loss. Whereas a Freudian
desire to belong is quintessentially the desire for ones death (prompting Brooks to argue that narrative desire is ultimately the desire for
the end, for a promised state of quiescence), the respective Lacanian
yearning is essentially circular, leading to ever more desire, and never
to more belonging. Yet grave as this difference most certainly is, one
basic similarity is even more substantial. In both scenarios the yearning
subject may dream of, yearn for, or even contest having a place in the
worldbut it cannot build such a place. It may have been these implications that led Gabriele Schwab, in her theorization of narrativity,
to D. W. Winnicott rather than to Freud or Lacan. For Winnicott, the
mothers absence creates a transitional space that functions as a space
for the imaginations testing and mastering of the demands and tasks
posed by the gradual development of intersubjectivitya process that
makes this space potentially generative of poetic speech with the effect
of alleviating the subjects entanglement with the symbolic order.39 In
fact, the psychic space of transference invites the subject to continu-

no place like home

31

ally reshape its boundaries through an imaginary encounter with others.

This also means that immersion in narrative does not necessarily create
misrecognition (as it does for Lacan), but that it can at best lead to
valuable transformation.
Narrative art plays into this model by providing protected versions of
psychic space so that the experience of breaking down the boundaries
between the real and the imaginary can be safely reenacted throughout
a persons life; narrative production, in turn, gravitates toward poetic
expression and fictional boundary crossing out of the subjects yearning
for an other. Yet if this notion of narrativity corresponds with a psychic
structure that is highly amenable to change and explicitly geared toward
imaginative culture, the transformation it envisions remains confined
to a logic of internalization and projection. The yearning subject may
keep readjusting its boundaries in engaging with narrative art again and
again, but it cannot proactively transform what lies beyond them. Brooks
argues along similar lines when proposing that all narrative acts are
bound to discover, and make use of the intersubjective and inherently
dialogic nature of language itself (RP 60). Embedded in this discovery is
the secret of narrative transferenceBrookss ruby red slippers. The
motivation of plotting . . . is intimately connected to the desire of narrating, the desire to tell, which in turn has much to do with the need
for an interlocutor, a listener who enters into the narrative exchange
(RP 216). Brooks turns to Roland Barthess notion of the contractual
nature of all storytellingits asking for something in return for what it
suppliesand contends that contract is too static a term to conceive
of this exchange, for it fails to acknowledge the degree of transformation invoked by it.
I couldnt agree more with this assessment, especially with the yearning for a receiving other that is both expressed and pursued in and
through narrative. Yet I cannot help but notice how strikingly close these
ideas are to the basic premise of reception aesthetics: that narrative is
incomplete without a willing receiver, and that theorizing narrativity
must thus account for the insurmountably (inter)subjective and provisional dimension of transfer and exchange. Schwab moves in a similar
direction when combining Winnicotts transitional space with Georges
Poulets phenomenology of reading, for the sake of substantiating the
transformative capacities of consuming narratives.40 It is worth pondering
these phenomenological proxies for another moment, for they bring out
an interesting deformation (I am tempted to say), that of psychoanalytic
models of narrativity. For without at least a dose of phenomenologys
decidedly spatial positioning of the subject in the world (and especially
without the thetic move toward the world that this involves), narrative is

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doomed to become a self-serving vehicle of desire, relentlessly engendering products of the imagination that are nothing but symptoms of
an insurmountable state of lack. And while they may be interesting or
even innovative manifestations of this lack, the only remedy they have
in store is to love or enjoy ones symptom.41
What, then, do phenomenological premises have to offer? While also
assuming that narrative productivity springs from an anthropological lack,
this lack is not the result of a primary experience of loss. Rather, it is in
and of itself foundational. Since humans, having weaker instincts than
other animals, are not as closely wired to the environment, their lacking
connectivity bestows upon the world (when perceived by this impaired
life-form) a fundamental lack of meaning. In fact, human beings experience themselves (especially in the early stages of gaining consciousness)
as having been involuntarily thrust (geworfen) into a world that must have
preceded their own existence, and that, upon realizing their primary
disjunction from this world, seems infinite and senseless. It is the realization of this fundamental lack of meaning and connectivity that imposes
onto human beings the existential task of interpretation, to which the
unknowability of death poses the greatest challenge.42 This is the basic
setup of Heideggers ontological hermeneutics, and, acknowledged or
not, it has vast repercussions in the works of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul
Ricoeur, and the proponents of the Constance School, who all assume
that interpretation (and thus narrative activity) is a basic constituent
of human being. Yet while the phenomenological lack of meaning and
connectivity is just as insurmountable as the psychoanalytical lack of
wholeness, it does not go back to a traumatic experience of loss and
is thus less inclined to produce hermetic states of mourning (such as
nostalgia or melancholia) or other self-enamoring economies of desire.
Rather it is this kind of lack that draws us out of ourselves and into the
world, forcing us to engage with the world by insisting on the priority
of the experience of being in the world.43 The phenomenological type
of anthropological lack thus leads directly to a yearning for voice and
form; it leads, in other words, to language, which assumes its referentiality (and thus its narrative capacity) through the existential yearning to
make the world over in terms that are meaningful.44
But the experience of being thrust into a world that fundamentally
lacks meaning (and thus lacks a securely given place for human beings)
does not only trigger an existential need for narrative; it also leads to
the realization that dwelling is never securely given but rather a matter
of learning to dwell. For Heidegger, being in the world (Dasein) assumes
a place and sense of self through building, an activity that gathers dispersed aspects of the environment and sets human beings in relation

33

no place like home

to the world thus opened up for them. In fact, the realization of lack
calls mortals into their dwelling.45 Temporal contingency thus leads
directly to an investment in place-making. But building may or may not
succeed. Conditionally tied to its bearers hermeneutical capacities, it is,
indeed, the ability to think that enables both building and dwelling. Yet
this notion of thinking is by no means coolly rational and disembodied;
rather, it is tied to an affective, sensual, and quintessentially imaginative
perception of the world. In . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . Heidegger
has amplified these romantic implications by moving from thinking to
poiesis, a hermeneutical practice that has the capacity to transform the
world into a suitable dwelling place by taking imaginative measure.46 But
where Heidegger turns to Hlderlin, the poet behind the essays title,
I want to return to Dorothys act of calling one more time. For isnt
theres no place like home an equal attempt to take measure? To exploit
the imagination for the sake of simultaneously realizing a longing for
that place called home and its tenuous, fleeting mode of existence? In
bringing out, whether intended or not, its inherently provisional nature,
Dorothys call has the capacity to enable dwelling rather than merely
projecting and thus further displacing it.

At Home in Narrative
Dwelling, then, in the Heideggerian sense suggested here, is not an
illusory wish or phantasmatic enterprise. It is the practical, pragmatic
function of narrativeits primary means and end. That it gravitates
toward the artistic realm to articulate the meaning of our lives makes it
an especially potent remedy, for otherwise narrative productivity would
likely become repetitive and stale, and its dwelling places of little use.47
The productive conjunction of narrative and place-making envisioned
here makes it worth returning to Heidegger today. At the same time,
however, such a move must vehemently reject his reactionary longings
to return to an Arcadian place untouched by modernityand, instead,
must conceive narratives building capacities as an inherently progressive,
forward-moving response to spatio-temporal contingency. Thinking of
this trajectory in terms of Ricoeurs life of narrative activity may serve
as a viable touchstone here.48 Sustained by an ever-changing repertoire
of experiences brought to language, narrative productivity thrives on
a tension between sedimentation and innovation that creates ever new
storied forms. In the fusion of the world of the text and the world of
the reader (Ricoeur takes this idea straight from the Constance School),
these forms become available beyond the depragmatized, imaginary

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new literary history

realm of their conceptiona point that Iser amplifies when, assessing

the anthropological function of narrative art, he insists that its pragmatic
significance . . . for action becomes unmistakable.49
From such a perspective, narrative art is not a mere tool for mending
shattered epistemologies (as it is, for instance, in Lukcss Theory of the
Novel); rather, it plays a vital role in engendering new forms of agency.
And if Dorothys call gives voice to a quintessentially modern sense of
being in the world, then what we discover at the end of her journey testifies to belongings enhanced relation with narrative: there is, indeed, no
place like home unless we build it, word by word, sentence by sentence,
storyline by storyline. The construction material is mostly prefabricated,
and much of it may even be bluntly imposed. But dwelling still draws
us out into the world, where it leaves us with at least some leeway in
terms of how to go about the task at hand. And there is yet another
lesson in Dorothys call. It may propel the story toward its ending, but
getting home will not put an end to the need for narrative. Perhaps we
could say, then, that dwelling in narrative is as good as the next story
from which we build.
University of Freiburg
Notes
1 Vikki Bell, Performativity and Belonging: An Introduction, Theory, Culture & Society
16, no. 2 (1999): 1.
2 Jacques Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London:
Continuum, 2004), 1213.
3 I am thinking here, in particular, of the Russian Formalists, Vladimir Propp, Northrop
Frye, Seymour Chatman, A. J. Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov, and Grard Genette, and of the
narratological work of Roland Barthes.
4 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982) (hereafter cited as RP); Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984).
5 For Brooks, narrative is strictly retrospective; it recovers life from such a safe distance
that its spatial renderings are boldly dismissed. Paul Ricoeur, on the other hand, assumes
that narrative is fundamentally entangled with life.Yet his work on the topic is so deeply
invested in matters of human temporality that its spatial correlative is simply ignored.
Even more recent approaches of this line of work have not yet begun to integrate (or
even acknowledge) narratives mutual involvement with time and space. See, for instance,
Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Univ. Press, 2007) and Jonas Grethlein, The Narrative Reconfiguration of Time Beyond
Ricoeur, Poetics Today 31, no. 2 (2010):31329. The idea of literature/narrating being a
temporal art (and painting/imaging being a spatial one) goes, of course, all the way back
to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,Laokoon (1766), ed.Wilfried Barner (Frankfurt am Main:
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2007).
6 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 5.

no place like home

35

7 For examples of the metaphorological branch of work, see Kai Mikkonen, The Narrative is Travel Metaphor: Between Spatial Sequence and Open Consequence, Narrative
15, no. 3 (2007): 286305 and Simon Kemp, The Inescapable Metaphor: How Time
and Meaning Become Space When We Think about Narrative, Philosophy and Literature
36, no. 2 (2012): 391403. For narratological work on narrative space see, for example,
Elana Gomel, Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature(New
York: Routledge, 2014) and Marie-Laure Ryan, Space, www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/
space (last visited: January 10, 2015). For work on physical narrative space, see Herman
Kossmann, Suzanne Mulder, and Frank den Oudsten, Narrative Space: On the Art of Exhibiting (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2012). For work on narratives entanglement with
conceived space, see David Nye, Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of
American Culture (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997) and Sophia Psarra, Architecture
and Narrative: The Formation of Space and Cultural Meaning (New York: Routledge, 2009).
Henri Lefebvre develops the idea of conceived space in his seminal The Production of
Space (1974; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991). An early yet little-acknowledged narratological approach to theorizing narrative space is from Gabriel Zoran, Towards a Theory
of Space in Narrative, Poetics Today 5, no. 2 (1984): 30935.
8 Margaret R. Somers, The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network
Approach, Theory and Society 23, no. 5 (1994): 61314.
9 Somers, Narrative Constitution, 607. Adriana Cavarero and Hanna Meretoja have
turned to exploring the ethical dimension of narrative as a distinct form of social action
and agency. See Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Seflhood (New York: Routledge,
2000) and Meretoja, Narrative and Human Existence: Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics, New Literary History 45, no. 1 (2014): 89109.
10 A notable exception (with a distinct and valuable focus on European developments)
is Meretojas The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling
from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
11 Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 168.
12 While this suggests that narrative plays a crucial part in the production of space and
place that thinkers of the spatial turn like Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and Massey have
elucidated in their work, concerns with narrative are strikingly absent from the critical
discourse on space and place. The few works that do engage with this topic, such as Nyes
Narrative and Spaces and Psarras Architecture and Narrative, refrain from conceptualizing
the interlocking productivities of space, place, and narrative.
13 Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22. For Foucault, this
shift coincides with the advent of structuralism, which is after all a distinctly spatial mode
of understanding. Yet if Lefebvres The Production of Space can be seen as the foundational
text of a structuralism-inspired rethinking of space, there was a substantial lag between
its initial publication in 1974 and the wide attention stirred by its English translation in
1991, a history that it shares with Foucaults essay, which originates from a lecture given
in 1967 but was hardly noticed until its English publication in 1986all of which amounts
to saying that the 1980s were the decisive decade for both the spatial and the narrative
turns.
14 Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 22. See also Hayden White, The Nineteenth Century
as Chronotope (1987), The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory,
19572007, ed. Robert Doran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2010), 23746.
15 See Somers, Narrative Constitution, for a concise overview of this development.
16 See, for example, Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct, ed. Theodore
R. Sarbin (New York: Praeger, 1986), esp. Sarbin, Introduction and Overview, ixvxiii,
and Sarbin, The Narrative as Root Metaphor for Psychology, 321; Hermeneutics and
Psychological Theory: Interpretive Perspectives on Personality, Psychotherapy, and Psychopathology,

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new literary history

ed. Stanley B. Messer, Louis A. Sass, and Robert L. Woolfolk (New Brunswick: Rutgers
Univ. Press, 1988); and Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, ed. Leonard Berkowitz
(San Diego: Academic Press, 1988).
17 Kenneth Gergen and Mary Gergen, Narrative and the Self as Relationship, ed.
Leonard Berkowitz, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 21 (1988), 18 (hereafter cited
as NS).
18 The articulation effect is a core concept of Wolfgang Isers and Winfried Flucks
model of reception aesthetics. Not unlike Raymond Williamss notion of a structure of
feelings that can become tangible in and through cultural artifacts, yet with an elaborate
theorization of the transfer at stake, the basic idea is that fictionas fictionalizing acts that
perform a constant border crossing between the world of the text and the world of the
readerpropels the articulation of that which does not yet have a social correlative. See
especially Iser, Fictionalizing Acts, Amerikastudien/American Studies 31, no. 14 (1986):
515 and Fluck, The Role of the Reader and the Changing Functions of Literature
(2002), revised and reprinted as Why We Need Fiction: Reception Aesthetics, Literary
Anthropology, Funktionsgeschichte, in Romance With America? Essays on Culture, Literature,
and American Studies, ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009),
36584.
19 Iser writes about the articulation effect of art (which he calls play) that it is bound
to mobilize the imaginary in a different manner, for it has far less of the pragmatic orientation required by the subject, by the consciousness, or by the sociohistorical, all of which
channel the imaginary in quite specific directions. See Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary:
Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), 224. The concept of narrative life-forms is inspired by Ricoeurs notion of a life of narrative activity,
to which I will return at the end of this essay. See Ricoeur, Life in Quest of Narrative,
On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood (New York: Routledge, 1991),
24.
20 The term aesthetic regime is drawn from Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics. For two
forceful critiques of the resistance paradigm, see Fluck, Theories of American Culture
(and the Transnational Turn in American Studies), Romance With America?, ed. Bieger
and Voelz, 6985; Voelz Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists & Emersons Challenge
(Hanover, NH: Univ. Press of New England, 2010).
21 Judith Butler has taken up this issue in her essay Giving an Account of Oneself,
Diacritics 31, no. 4 (2001): 2240. See also Ricoeur, Narrative Identity, On Paul Ricoeur,
ed. Wood, 18899; Douglas Ezzy, Theorizing Narrative Identity: Symbolic Interactionism
and Hermeneutics, The Sociological Quarterly 39, no. 2 (1998): 23952. A good example
of the critical desire for radical states of non-belonging is Donald Pease, Introduction:
Remapping the Transnational Turn, Reframing the Transnational Turn in American Studies,
ed. Fluck, Pease, and John Carlos Rowe (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2011),
146.
22 The idea of ek-stasis is drawn from Helmut Plessner, Stufen des Organischen und der
Mensch (1928; Berlin: DeGruyter, 1969).
23 Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 4 (hereafter cited as SA). For White, this
development was set in motion once ontology no longer referred to a restricted field of
philosophical scrutiny into matters of being, but rather to a more general questioning of
what entities are presupposed by our theories. Ontological concerns have hence migrated
from philosophy to other academic fields, among them cultural or literary studies, and
have surfaced in recent claims about affect, language, and special forms of language use
such as narration. Attempts to conceptualize the existence of the world unmediated by
human subjectivity is another development. For the first development, see, for instance,

no place like home

37

Clare Hemmings, Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn, Cultural
Studies 19, no. 5 (2005): 54867; Henry McDonald, Language and Being: Crossroads of
Modern Literary Theory and Classical Ontology, Philosophy & Social Criticism 30, no. 2
(2004): 187220; and McDonald, The Ontological Turn: Philosophical Sources of American Literary Theory, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 45, no. 1 (2002):
333. Some key texts of the second development are Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: Minnesota Univ. Press,
1987); Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London:
Continuum, 2009); and Markus Gabriel, Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism
(London: Continuum, 2011).
24 It is worth stressing that this line of reasoning is not necessarily at odds with posthuman revisions of this entity, for it locates the figuration of the post/human being in a
thoroughly hybrid space between subject and environment. And if the network (with
its familiar challenges to nature-technology dichotomies) is todays dominant form of
life-world and subjectivity, then even though the individual in need of belonging may
not be human anymore, it is still quintessentially weak and mortal, still inclined to use its
narrative capacitates to deal with these basic vulnerabilities.
25 This etymological assessment is based on The Oxford English Dictionary (1933; repr.,
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961); The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology (New York:
H. W. Wilson, 1988); The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1966); A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1916); Dictionary.
com, http://dictionary.reference.com; Middle English Dictionary, http://quod.lib.umich.edu.
26 Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London:
Verso, 1989), 27.
27 See Lefebvre, The Production of Space.
28 Over the course of the twentieth century, the spatial correlatives of belonging have
become increasingly vexed: geographical and social spaces are less and less congruent
while digital technology renders them more and more deterritorialized and imaginary.
See, for instance, Ulrich Beck, Vorwort, Perspektiven der Weltgesellschaft, ed. Beck (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998) and Arjun Appadurai, Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and
Queries for a Transnational Anthropology, Recapturing Anthropololy: Working in the Present,
ed. Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe, NM: School for American Research Press, 1991).
29 Applying Northrop Fryes formalist model to historiography, Hayden White famously
argues that historiography follows the same basic narrative modes as fiction (comedy,
tragedy, romance, satire), which are, in turn, inclined to use different kinds of figurative language (from tragedy to metonymy, romance to synecdoche, satire to irony). See
White, Metahistory:The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973). White summarizes the basic argument in The Historical Text
as Literary Artifact, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1976; Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), 81100.
30 See Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov,
The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 19002000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale (1936; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 36278.
31 Georg Lukcs, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great
Epic Literature (1916; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 41, 88, 56 (hereafter cited as TN).
32 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Novel and the Epic, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed.
Michael Holquist (1941; Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), 11 (hereafter cited as NE).
33 The early phase of the American novel caught in the crossfire of these debates is
thoroughly discussed in Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel
in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), and Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs:
The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 17901860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985). For

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early writers of fiction such as William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Holcroft,
Robert Bage, Helen Maria Williams, and Charles Brockden Brown, new ideas about the
imagination and its relation to sentiment served as a touchstone for a new reformist
literature. Strong emotion, they came to believe, could encourage moral behavior, and
imaginative literature could thus become instrumental in fostering democratic societies.
See Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 17801805 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976) and English
Fiction of the Romantic Period, 17891830 (London: Longman, 1989); Pamela Clemit, The
Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, and Mary Shelly (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1993); and Stephen Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American
Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press,
2008).
34 See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. John W. Yolton (1690;
London: Dent, 1961) and David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge
(17391740; Oxford: Oxford at Clarendon Press, 1967). Locke claims that the human
mind does not process innate ideas but begins its life as a tabula rasa on which sensory
perceptions leave immediate and lasting imprints, although he pairs this new vulnerability
with a strong instinct for survival. Not only can the mind repeat the simple ideas; it also
has the capacity (albeit still quite mechanical) to rearrange, alter, and fuse the separate
elements that it perceives almost infinitely. Hume dismisses the stability of the external
world, which was the last resort of certainty in Lockes model. The mind now responds
to experiencing the world so strongly according to its own fears and desires that any certainty about it is rendered intangible. The inner world, now the crucial site of gaining a
sense of belonging, is assumed to have no rigid barriers, and the most significant activity
occurs when reason and passionstimulated by the imaginationmix so thoroughly
that distinguishing them becomes impossible. As this quintessential enabler of mental
life, the imagination can never not be part of human understanding, but its tendencies to
exaggerate or tone down the emotional effect on an idea make it potentially treacherous.
For further reading on this topic, see James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment
to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981), and Iser, The Fictive and the
Imaginary.
35 Playful is, indeed, a deliberate and careful choice here, for it points toward the
productive, forth-bringing notion of artistic playfulness in the works of hermeneutical
thinkers such as Iser and Ricoeur, which serves as the vantage point for the concluding
stretch of my argument.
36 My awareness of this anthropological grounding of cultural and literary theory is indebted to Fluck, who taught me to always look for premises. An essay of his on the topic
of anthropological premises is forthcoming in this journal.
37 But these operations would not be reducible to expressing and giving coherence to
mere want, for they are backed by a visceral need to belong, not unlike the irreducible
needs of the material body. Such a need-demand structure of desire follows Lacans reinterpretation of the Freudian concept, in which desire is born from a split between need
(for nourishment/the mothers breast) and demand (for love). Desire is irreducible to
need, for it is not in its principle relation to a real object, independent of the subject,
but rather to a phantasy; it is irreducible to demand, in that it seeks to impose itself without taking account of language and the unconscious of the other, and insists on being
absolutely recognized by the other. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la
psychoanalyse (Paris: Presses des Universitaires de France, 1971), 122; quoted in Brooks,
Reading for the Plot, 55.
38 Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principle is, indeed, the masterplot for Brookss narrative
theory. See Chap. 2, which was separately published as Freuds Masterplot, Yale French
Studies 55/56 (1977): 280300.

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39

39 Gabriele Schwab, Subjects without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994), 28; The Mirror and the Killer Queen: Otherness in Literary
Language (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1996), 146. Coming out of the Constance
School, Schwab posits her notion of reading as an act of transference against Isers notion of transfer, which she finds too schematic in its intersubjective engagement with
the other.
40 See Schwab, The Mirror and the Killer Queen, 2527. Another important point of reference
for her is Julia Kristevas Revolution in Poetic Language (1974; New York, Columbia Univ.
Press, 1984). In this early monograph, Kristeva, who is usually steeped in psychoanalysis
and poststucturalism, turns to Husserls idea of the thetic to conceptualize significations
inherent positionality, its indispensible and processual working across space.
41 This last formulation evokes Slavoj iek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood
and Out (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2001).
42 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927; Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010), esp.
chapters 46. To describe this existential reality of human being, Heidegger uses the term
Dasein; it does not provide an unmediated basis of being but arises from its own projectionand is thus the result of interpretation.
43 Mario J. Valds, Introduction: Paul Ricoeurs Post-Structuralist Hermeneutics, A
Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Valds (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1991), 6.
44 In Ricoeurs words, It is because there is first something to say, because we have an
experience to bring to language, that conversely language is not only directed towards
ideal meaning but also refers to what is. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the
Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian Univ. Press, 1976), 21; quoted in Valds,
Introduction, 5.
45 Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking, Poetry, Language, Thought, ed. Albert Hofstadter (1951; New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 159 (emphasis in the original). In what
reads like an anticipation of the spatial turn, Heidegger contends in this essay that we
can only think of space as space used by human beings (and thus as social space), given
to them through their need to dwell, and constantly changed by their building efforts.
46 Heidegger, . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . Poetry, Language, Thought, 20927. The
forth-bringing capacity that poiesis brings to dwelling resonates with Heideggers general
notion of art as making present that which is not yet present and which only becomes
present through art. See Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art (193536), Poetry,
Language, Thought, 1586.
47 Ricoeur uses the term pharmakon to describe this alleviating, healing dimension of
narrative. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 43; quoted in Valds, Introduction, 6.
48 Ricoeur, Life in Quest of Narrative, 24.
49 Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, 168 (my emphasis).

CONTRIBUTORS
Laura Bieger is Professor for American Literary and Cultural Studies at the
Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg. She has also held teaching and research
positions at the Free University of Berlin, the University of CaliforniaBerkeley,
and the University of Vienna. She is the author of sthetik der Immersion (2007),
which looks at urban spaces that stage a perceptual conjunction of world and
image, with an interest in the epistemological function of aesthetic experience.
Her current book, No Place Like Home, develops a narrative theory based on the
human need to belong and applies it to American novels from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first century.
Adriana Cavarero is an Italian philosopher and feminist thinker. She teaches
at the University of Verona and focuses on philosophy, politics, and literature.
Her books in English include In Spite of Plato (1995); Relating Narratives (2000);
Stately Bodies (2002); For More Than One Voice (2005); and Horrorism (2009).
Brent Dawson is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Davidson College. He
specializes in English Renaissance literature and literary theory, with a strong
interest in questions of globalization, gender, and sexuality. His current book
project, The Baseless Fabric: Worldly Matters and Global Relations in the English Renaissance, looks at the importance of literary form to Renaissance conceptions
of global systems.
Tim Howles is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at
the University of Oxford and Gosden Water-Newton scholar at Keble College.
His research focuses on the religious implications of the thought of Michel
Serres and Bruno Latour.
Richard Kearney holds the Charles Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston
College. His recent books include Anatheism: Returning to God After God (2011),
Carnal Hermeneutics, coedited with Brian Treanor, and Reimagining the Sacred,
both forthcoming in 2015. He is director of the International Guestbook
Project,Exchanging StoriesChanging History, at Boston College.
Bruno Latour is a professor of Sciences Po in Paris and has published extensively in the domain of science studies and more generally on the anthropology
of modernism. His books include We Have Never Been Modern (1991); Iconoclash
(2002); Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004); Making
Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (2005); Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2007); On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2010);
and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013).
New Literary History, 2015, 46: 187188

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