Whose Narrative is it Anyway?

The latest issue of The New York Review has an article entitled “Once Upon a Time There Was a Big Bubble.” Written by Cass R. Sunstein, the text is a review of Robert J. Shiller’s latest book, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events. The idea of representing the structure of rich media content in terms of narrative occupied my thinking during the Nineties. I spent much of the first half of that decade at a research laboratory in Singapore, running a project concerned with developing techniques for indexing video content, including video that was primarily narrative in nature, such as commercial films and episodes of television series. When, in 1995, I returned to the United States to lead a Multimedia group at the Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory, I shifted my focus to hypermedia authoring; and, thanks to Seymour Chatman, a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, I found myself introduced to the discipline known as narratology.

Thanks to Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature, it did not take me long to verify that the noun “narratology” never shows up in Schiller’s book, nor does it appear in Sunstein’s review. Rather, the book is concerned with how stories may be used as examples that, at best, may lead to hypothesis creation. Since a story can never be anything other than an example, Schiller makes it clear that stories cannot validate such hypotheses. At best they can help invalidate a hypothesis by providing a counterexample.

Narratology teaches us that narrative is a complex structure unto itself. In his book Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Chatman explains how a narrative text is the product of an elaborate process. First, there is the simple division between what is recounted by a story and the discourse techniques involved in the recounting process. The story itself can then be structured into events and “existents.” The events are divided into actions willfully taken by agents and “happenings,” events that occur independent of agent activities. Those agents constitute one of the two subclasses of the existents, the other being the setting in which both actions and happenings occur.

One may say that Shiller’s book presents the reader with examples of stories and why they may influence the course of economic events. However, any understanding of how stories come to be or how they are interpreted by those to whom a story is told is left as an exercise for the reader. In the course of my efforts to link Chatman’s theoretical writings to the technical machinery of hypermedia, I learned about Deirdre McClosky, currently Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I discovered that McClosky had written a book entitled The Rhetoric of Economics as early as 1985, which saw a second edition in 1998. This was followed by The Writing of Economics in 1987 (reprinted as Economical Writing in 2000), The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric in 1988, and If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise in 1990. More recently, she wrote The Economic Conversation in 2008 with Arjo Klamer and Stephen Ziliak.

As my research progressed, I discovered that narrative had become a popular bandwagon for those that liked to call themselves “futurists.” It did not take me long to realize that I did not want to explore their paths. One of them had proposed a “digital campfire” for exchanging stories, which turned out to be nothing more than a display of a virtual burning fire around which “real people” could gather! Snake-oil was easy to find during the second half of the Nineties.

Mind you, I have too much respect for other writings by Schiller to accuse him of pedaling snake-oil. Nevertheless, Sunstein’s review left me with the impression that Schiller’s book served up a generous platter of “what” without necessary venturing into the “why” behind all that “what.” It is, of course, important that stories often figure significantly when invoked as part of the logic of decision making or forecasting. Ultimately, however, those stories are “soft” data, which persuade through rhetorical disposition, rather than abstract logic. They may be valuable when brainstorming, but inferences based on mere hypotheses are never sound. We need safeguards to avoid rushing to conclusions that cannot be validated by hard logic. Put another way, we must be careful that “stories that drive major economic events” do not lead us over the edge of a very high cliff!