Royston Reflection 2

“Narrative analysis is an activity of cultural analysis.”

            The statement by Mieke Bal can be read fruitfully in two ways: “narrative analysis is an activity of analyzing the culture that produced the narrative” and “narrative analysis is an activity of analyzing one’s own culture.”  These two readings are not mutually exclusive, and indeed, Bal’s “true” meaning may be found in reading her statement both ways at once.  If narrative provides an avenue by which one culture can come into contact with another, then narrative analysis can be the act of analyzing the intersection of those two (or more) cultures.

            At its most basic level, narrative analysis identifies some of the values held by the culture that produced the narrative in question.  Cinderella’s ultimate fate, happy marriage to royalty in a castle, speaks volumes about the culture that produced it.  Royalty is the ideal.  That the prince marries the common Cinderella alludes to another cultural value.  Royalty is still connected with the common class, and indeed may need periodic injections of common blood to maintain its vitality.  Isn’t that our hope for Kate?  That her fresh genes will counteract the royal trend towards frog eyes and weak chins?

            That simple, and admittedly juvenile analysis of Cinderella in turn speaks volumes about my own culture.  That I identify “royalty=ideal” as an aspect of the culture that produced Cinderella implies that it is not an aspect of my own because if it was, I might not identify it at all, instead seeing it as some universal constant not worth mentioning.  But what speaks even more about my own culture is the way in which I express it, my discourse.  My irreverence speaks to my culture’s disregard for the entire institute of royalty and its attendant castles.

            And it is at the level of discourse that the narrative speaks more about the culture that produced it as well.  There is a singular Cinderella fabula, but there are many Cinderella stories made by many different cultures, each with its own subtle and not so subtle changes from the “original.”  And the ways in which these different “versions” differ from one another say a great deal about what the cultures that produce them found valuable in Cinderella’s tale.

           And how we identify and speak about those differences says a great deal about our own culture.  This may seem circular, and perhaps it is, but I prefer to visualize it as centrifugal, allowing us to separate and examine different elements like so much plasma and platelets.