The I that Tells Itself: A Bakhtinian Perspective on Narrative Identity

Abstract

The ambiguity of the title, borrowed from Derrida's The Ear of the Other (13), is not accidental: the I as both the addressee and the subject-object of a performative telling is precisely what is at stake in the question of narrative identity, a literary con- cept which has attained a near-Kantian magnitude since the 1980s and crept into, or perhaps even, as some have argued, taken over and colonized the discourse of philos- ophy, psychology, and historiography. 1 The cost of this narrative imperialism is a cer- tain dilution and trivialization of the conception of the human subject as a story-telling being, which calls for a more rigorous probing of the narrative identity its heuristic value, and its philosophical, psychological and ethical implica- tions. This challenge has been taken up by Galen Strawson in an article entitled Against Narrativity, premised on a clear-cut distinction between the Psychological Narrativity thesis—a straightforwardly empirical, descriptive thesis about the way ordinary human beings actually experience their lives, and the Ethical Narrativity thesis, which states that experiencing or conceiving one's life as a narrative is a good thing (428). Appealing as this neat distinction may be, I believe that we have more to gain by taking on board the essential and productive messiness of the concept, which does not lend itself to waterproof compartmentalization. Indeed, the most interesting feature of what has become a buzzword in those disciplines which deal with human beings is precisely this evident transition, made by so many of its proponents, from a descriptive (psychological) to a prescriptive (ethical) conception of narrative identity. The difficulty of extricating the psychological from the ethical aspects of the debate is evident in the critique of Narrativity mounted from two diametri-