The past, present, and future of narrative criminology: A review and an invitation

Abstract

As J.W. Ironmonger’s 2012 novel The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder opens, the protagonist Max is lying face up, dead, on his own front room dining table. On his 21st birthday, Max decided to lock himself in his apartment, curtains drawn, to systematically map his entire brain’s contents for his thesis work in philosophy at the University of Cambridge. The project was supposed to last three years. Three decades later, his fifty-one year old body is surrounded by his life’s work: Shelves filled with 1600 books and folders, including 358 volumes of autobiographical monologue painstakingly recorded on note paper and bound in red leather (the so-called ‘narrative volumes’). His ‘Catalogue’ also includes shelves after shelves of grey A4 lever-arch files (the ‘day logs’) recording experiences that strictly speaking should not have happened. When a leaky pipe, a blown light bulb or a heavy thunderstorm interrupted the project, Max had to record it for the sake of completion. This everyday “mess” should have been “controlled away” to leave Max’s 21-year-old brain pure and pristine and untainted by ongoing events. Unfortunately, life had a habit of intruding on his ongoing storytelling project with new events, making the task never-ending. Max’s life was spent trying to tell his own life’s story without actually living it. Death has now made his catalogue complete. The story has ended. Or has it? What is the end of a story, and where does it begin? The sharing of stories is an important part of the human condition. People seem to have a fundamental drive to tell and listen to them. We use them to communicate and reproduce ingroup solidarity. They may provoke strong emotions. They may be simultaneously entertaining and educational; it is no coincidence that we tell children stories to help them understand and explore a chaotic world. One reason is that storytelling is a basic device for creating, providing and assigning meaning. Stories are good at making simple what is complicated. At the same time, some of the complexity is retained because stories by their very nature are ambiguous and openended. They are an important resource in everyday life and in times of celebration and difficulty; crucial for the way we live, and for the organisation of society. Even our very identity and sense of self is narratively constructed. We make sense of ourselves and our relationships with others by sharing stories and through our individual on-going inner narrative. Stories are, simply put, at the core of what makes us who and what we are. Narrative criminology refers to the study of the role the telling and sharing of stories play in committing, upholding and effecting desistance from crime and other harmful acts. It is hard to say when the story of narrative criminology began. It is, perhaps, one of those stories that have several beginnings. One very early beginning can be traced back to ancient Athens. In Poetics, Aristotle (2013), the grandfather of all narrative analysis, laid out the founding principles of modern-day narratology. Aristotle studied the characteristics of a successful 663558 CMC0010.1177/1741659016663558Crime, Media, Culture research-article2016