Storytelling

Story Theory

Mikhail Bakhtin, in Dostoevsky's Poetics, treats story as other than narrative, as being more dialogical and polyphonic than monological narrative. Jacques Derrida, in Living On: Borderlines, theorizes narrative as a violent instrument of interrogation, whereas story (récit) is more of a double entity, that is larger and smaller than itself, identifies itself, is different from itself, and comprehends without comprehending itself. Italo Calvino, in If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, says we are producing too many stories, are saturated by them, finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first. Story therefore constantly takes in new content with each performance context and travels with many companion stories. When story settles to a repeatable script it becomes transformed into narrative representation and splits off from its dynamic shape shifting. If it does not, then the story is without beginning, middle, or end, in a web that is never ending.

Antenarrative is a concept Boje developed in Narrative Research Methods in Organization and Communication Research, as a way to understand how stories that refuse narrative order, or are not yet becoming narrative order, can accomplish a good deal of transformation. An antenarrative represents both a bet (ante) and a before (ante); thus, it refers to the before of storyability. When there is storyability, there is a shaping of events and characters into experience and into memory, as well as a reshaping of memory. Once the reshaping happens there is storyability, and then, perhaps, clusters of antenarratives converge into some nexus that is narrative, and the narrative can split apart or dissolve into strands of antenarrative. In a case it is a matter of noticing the antenarrating, the would-be storyability, as well as the emergence of the narrative and its potential dissolution.

Story reflexivity is a matter of noticing the internal and external dialogue among our identities. For example, Kenneth Jørgensen (2007, pp. 70–71) proposes Foucauldian genealogy as an attempt to remain faithful of the spirit of antenarrative, and avoid the deception of narrative, by studying how present practices have emerged as the consequence of complex interactions, negotiations, and struggles among many different actors, intentions, and interests. The point is to create a more reflexive relationship to the present by creating an alternative memory, which is for the benefit of the time to come.

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