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Other People's Stories
Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy
By AMY SHUMAN University of Illinois Press
Copyright © 2005 Amy Shuman
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-252-02963-1
Introduction
SUBVERSIVE STORIES AND THE CRITIQUE OF EMPATHY
In every era the attempt must be made to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. -Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Storytelling promises to make meaning out of raw experiences; to transcend suffering; to offer warnings, advice, and other guidance; to provide a means for traveling beyond the personal; and to provide inspiration, entertainment, and new frames of reference to both tellers and listeners. I understand all of these possibilities as the promises, rather than the functions, of storytelling. They tell us not so much about what storytelling does as about the claims that can be made for it. As the stories I examine here demonstrate, the farther stories and storytelling travel from the experiences they recount, the more they promise. And stories almost always travel. The representation of experience in stories is often inadequate, failing the promise to represent and understand experience, but this failed promise, or in positive terms, the almost fulfilled promise, nonetheless provides a compelling process for making meaning of everyday life experience.
Sometimes, of course, storytelling fulfills its promise. Storytelling receives credit for making meaning or condemnation for appropriating meaning, praise for representing the unimaginable, or criticism for misrepresentation. The question is, what pushes storytelling to its limits? When does storytelling as making meaning become storytelling as misrepresentation and misappropriation? One answer may be in the connection between misrepresentation and misappropriation as separate but connected ethical complaints. These two fault lines, the land mines of criticism in storytelling in everyday life, both crack open when stories travel.
The center of my study of stories that travel is what I call "small-world stories." These stories of coincidental meetings are familiar both in literature, from the epic to the novel, and in personal narratives told in everyday life. In literature as in everyday life, small-world stories can be a trope, moving the plot from behind, or the substance of an inquiry about destiny, foreclosing the plot from in front. In either case, small-world stories are about travels, and they are stories that travel, reports told by and to people not necessarily present in the experience the stories recount. They provide one example of how storytelling works and, specifically, how telling our stories beyond their original context or telling other people's stories pushes the limits of storytelling.
Small-world stories are about coincidences, but not all coincidence stories claim the world as small. My friend and colleague Ned Lebow's story is the kind of small-world story that is about fate and destiny. He has published a version of his personal story (1999), but he told me a slightly different version, which I will tell here. To tell someone else's story is either to provide news or to make an example of it; here, I tell the story as a profound example of a story about making meaning out of raw experience and as an example of a story that has traveled, and continues to travel, with this telling. I heard Ned Lebow's story the first time I met him, in a conversation that was itself about mutual connections, a small-world conversation that led to his small-world story. I told Lebow that my aunt had been a Jewish child in hiding in France throughout World War II. In 1942, the Nazis rounded up Jewish immigrants in Paris and deported them to death camps. Lebow told me that he, too, had been born in Paris and that his mother, also a Jewish immigrant, had been deported in 1942. But he learned this story retrospectively. All he knew growing up was that he had been adopted as a baby from a particular New York Jewish adoption agency. The story he has been able to put together is that his mother and he, then an infant, were rounded up and sent with the other Jewish immigrants to a stadium on the outskirts of Paris. As they were being taken to the trains to be sent to the death camps, a woman threw her baby to one of the policemen as she was being led away. The policeman defied orders and arranged for several children to be saved. The children were handed over to a group of Frenchborn Jewish women who arranged their complicated and difficult, but ultimately safe, passage to a New York adoption agency. Lebow's American parents adopted him as an infant from that very same agency, in 1942. The scarcity of infants at the agency at that time suggests the likelihood that he was one of the newly arrived French Jewish children. As an adult, not many years ago, he met Paulette Fink, one of the French Jewish women who had arranged to smuggle the children out of France, and she told him the story. Lebow believes that he was very likely the baby thrown from the death camp train by his mother to the kind French policeman.
There are many stories here: the story of the baby thrown off the deportation train into the arms of a policeman who arranged his safe harbor; the story of the French woman who survived the war to be able to tell the story of smuggling children out of France; the story of Lebow as an adult meeting the French woman and hearing what might be his own story; Lebow's adoption story; and the more general story of the deportation of foreign-born Jews in Paris. The story is Lebow's but not only Lebow's. It is a personal story, but like all Holocaust stories, its magnitude is greater than the personal. He sees the story as revealing the best of human nature in the face of the worst of human nature, the Holocaust, during which people risked their lives to save a group of children. The story is his, but at the same time, it is a story that cannot belong to him, in part because Ned Lebow depends on the stories of Paulette Fink, the adoption agency, the French policeman, and his parents, and in part because it cannot depend on his mother's story. In other words, his story intersects with other people's stories and at the same time points to missing stories. This juxtaposition between the intersections and the absences, among history, memory, and trauma, pushes the limits of storytelling.
When stories travel beyond their original tellers and contexts, they often bear a trace or track a connection to that origin. Lebow traces his story through a multidimensional vortex rather than a linear chronology. The planes of places and times (the New York adoption agency, Paris, the deportation camp in 1942, the journey taken by refugee children from Paris to New York) and people (his mother, Paulette Fink, the policeman, his parents) coincide to produce the story, and yet they remain pieces, fragments linked by fragile traces and marked by traumatic absences.
Storytelling is pushed to its limits both by the use of a particular story beyond the context of the experience it represents and by the use of a personal story to represent a collective experience. In each of the following chapters, I examine instances of stories pushed to these two limits. I understand the first as the problem of entitlement and the second as the problem of the allegorical. 3 Entitlement and allegory can be described formally, at the interactional and sociolinguistic levels of conversational analysis. It is the intersection of the two limits that produces what I see as the greatest complexity and the greatest source of both the promise of storytelling and its condemnation. We ask, who has the right to tell a story, who is entitled to it? And we ask, is this representation a sufficient, adequate, accurate, or appropriate rendering of experience? Ethical questions of ownership overlap with cultural conventions for representing experience. This model of entitlement begins with the rights accorded firsthand experience: individuals have firsthand knowledge that grants them a privileged position as knowers and a legitimate stake in the interpretation of their own experiences. Competing with this premise is the historiographical view that privileges the distant knower who has perspective and, by virtue of less or different stakes in the interpretation, the possibility of objectivity. Further complicating the disputed virtues of subjectivity or objectivity and the rights they accrue, however, is the use of stories to represent not just individual, but collective, experience. The more a story represents a generalized, shared, or even human experience, the higher the stakes in asserting or challenging illegitimacy. What raises the stakes is the claim that the truth that the story represents is not only factual, representing events that actually happened, but also true in the larger sense of conveying a true understanding of human experience. The process in which the personal or the particular story acquires that larger meaning is quite complex. It is in the process of transvaluing the personal to the more than personal (human, shared, universal) that stories often make or break their promises. In this book, I describe empathy as one process of transvaluation compromised by both allegory and entitlement. Empathy is the act of understanding others across time, space, or any difference in experience. Although empathy holds out a great, perhaps the greatest, promise of storytelling, it is at the same time a destabilizing element in storytelling. Empathy relies on, but also destabilizes, the association among persons and their experiences. It destabilizes entitlement by creating the possibility that people can legitimately retell each other's stories. It destabilizes meaning from the personal to the allegorical. When a personal story is used allegorically, as representative, typical, or stereotypical of a situation, entitlement claims are one way to challenge the allegory. The use of entitlement claims to challenge sentimentalizing allegories sometimes undermines empathy and the possibility of understanding across differences in experience. Often, entitlement claims are alibis for a failure of empathy. My goal in this book is to understand the promises of narrative, especially as those promises are produced by uses of allegory and entitlement, and to provide a critique of empathy at the site of the failed promises.
I want, on the one hand, to observe what happens when stories stray beyond the personal and are therefore subject to challenges of entitlement (that's my story, not yours) and, on the other, to investigate the allegorical as a place where people recognize themselves in each other's stories. How do stories change when people empathize with others' experiences? What do stories that purport to be more than personal look like, and where do they potentially trivialize or otherwise distort experiences? What happens when the empathizer understands something quite different from the person who suffered the experience? And what insights can be gained by trying to describe all of this using the sociolinguistic tools of conversational analysis? On the face of it, the idea that we recognize stories as belonging to someone other than the teller is an obvious observation. At the same time, the concept of people telling other people's stories provides a lens for viewing the pervasive use of the personal story to represent both the core of all human experience and the vast difference between people's experiences. My goal is neither to privilege the personal nor to suggest a caution against telling other people's stories. Quite the contrary, I begin with the premise that we do tell each other's stories and that this is the great promise that storytelling offers. I suggest that conversational storytelling has developed culturally specific critiques of empathy and that empathy and its critiques are part of the ethics of narrative.
Storytelling is an aspect of the ordinary. In face-to-face communication in everyday life, people tell each other stories about experiences, whose ownership they negotiate. Storytelling has been touted as a healing art or as a means for transforming oppressive conditions by creating an opportunity for suppressed voices to be heard (or for creating opportunities to listen to those voices). Very often, inspiration, redemption, emancipation, even subversion, require the appropriation of others' stories. The process of appropriation depends on stories traveling beyond their owners, beyond the personal, and beyond the claim to experience. This is not in itself troubling, nor do I dispute the redemptive or emancipatory possibilities of storytelling. In listening to or even retelling other people's stories, narrators become witnesses to others' experiences, and storytelling provides some hope for understanding across differences. But I propose a caution. The appropriation of stories can create voyeurs rather than witnesses and can foreclose meaning rather than open lines of inquiry and understanding. Appropriation can use one person's tragedy to serve as another's inspiration and preserve, rather than subvert, oppressive situations. Storytelling offers as one of its greatest promises the possibility of empathy, of understanding others. Empathy is one way that understanding can travel back toward the experience to recover the distance stories create when they are far from experience. Empathy offers the possibility of understanding across space and time, but it rarely changes the circumstances of those who suffer. If it provides inspiration, it is more often for those in the privileged position of empathizer rather than empathized. Storytelling needs a critique of empathy to remain a process of negotiating, rather than defending, meaning. The critique of empathy, and the recognition of the inevitably failed promises of storytelling, avoids an unchallenged shift in the ownership of experience and interpretation to whoever happens to be telling the story and instead insists on obligations between tellers, listeners, and the stories they borrow.
This book charts a course between the local and the global, the private and the public, the personal and the political, the everyday and the extraordinary. Each of these coupled terms and its histories is useful for exploring what Gayatri Spivak has termed "the experience of the impossible," an aporia that discloses itself in the unresolved and yet formalized relationship between the two terms (1999: 426). The seemingly fixed association between the paired terms in a binary relationship creates a reification. With many other scholars, I am working this reification, using it as a place from which to think and reconceptualize. I situate my discussions within other discussions of these categories, though where others have focused on contested public narratives, I draw attention to the role of personal narratives in the public sphere. My work addresses how personal narratives are appropriated in political processes, toward political action. Chapter 5, for example, considers the use of personal stories in fund-raising appeals.
Continues...
Excerpted from Other People's Stories by AMY SHUMAN Copyright © 2005 by Amy Shuman. Excerpted by permission.
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