Narrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles

by L. Timmel Duchamp

Narrative Who has it, and what are they going to do with it? How does the ability to tell stories and the need to hear them affect who has political power and who has none?
The right narrative in politics can win an election, gather a mob, destroy an enemy, start a war. In the study of history, control of the narrative confers power. It is commonly said that history is written by the the narrator chooses the events that will be part of the story, and the narrative explains their meaning. In fiction, narrative conventions and clichés make writing and reading familiar stories easier, but also impede writers’ efforts to tell unfamiliar stories. Is narrative inherently dangerous? Empowering? Conservative? Or liberating? A mix of established and new writers join several scholars in considering the politics of narrative manifested in fiction, history, and science.
This collection includes essays by Samuel R. Delany, Lance Olsen, Nicola Griffith, Lesley A. Hall, Alan DeNiro, Carolyn Ives Gilman, and others. It is commonly said that history is written by the the narrator chooses the events that will be part of the story, and the narrative explains their meaning. In fiction, narrative conventions and clichés make writing and reading familiar stories easier, but also impede writers’ efforts to tell unfamiliar stories. This volume Is narrative inherently dangerous? Empowering? Or even liberating? A mix of established and new writers join several scholars in considering the politics of narrative manifested in fiction, history, and science.
“There is a reason for the existence of cliché the easiest stories to tell and to listen to are the ones that everyone knows already, the ones that reinforce the listeners’ beliefs. The less sophisticated the listeners are—the younger the children—the less likely they are to tolerate change or ambiguity. A bedtime story about Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Richard will drive a 3-year-old slightly bananas if she knows anything at all about The Tale of Peter Rabbit .
“Adults, as a rule, also like to hear the same stories, although they prefer that the stories have some differences…. The popularity of familiar stories that reinforce the status quo is not limited to television and popular historians repeat themselves. Horatio-Alger stories thus become the narrative for male public figures who rise to success from poverty; for women, the story is more problematic, because female public figures are anomalous. In either case, the politics of the narrator inform the story being told. In narratives about women, as Joanna Russ has pointed out in her classic How to Suppress Women’s Writing , the narrator may simply deny that the woman actually accomplished anything worth noting.” — from the introduction by Eileen Gunn

Review
“...In this collection of essays, edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, narrative power is examined from sixteen different perspectives. The volume’s subtitle—Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles—explains why its essays linger in the mind. Its writers have skin in the game. Many of their insights have that bittersweet flavor peculiar to autobiographical accounts. Some of the essays are reprints, but most are from a WisCon 2009 panel session. This might explain the informal, leaning-towards-the-microphone quality of the writing. All the essays are worth a second read and an individual response....
“...Narratives do strange things to people and places. There is no final protection against malign narratives and the Pied Pipers of history except the steady pressure of conversation. We owe a debt of gratitude to L. Timmel Duchamp, Aqueduct Press, and the contributors. Volumes such this keep us alert, awake. May its tribe increase.” —Anil Menon, Strange Horizons , August 2010

272 pages, Paperback

First published March 28, 2010

About the author

L. Timmel Duchamp was born in 1950, the first child of three. Duchamp first began writing fiction in a library carrel at the University of Illinois in 1979, for a joke. But the joke took on a life of its own and soon turned into a satirical roman a clef in the form of a murder mystery titled "The Reality Principle." When she finished it, she allowed the novel to circulate via photocopies, and it was a great hit in the academic circles in which she then moved. One night in the fall of 1984 she sat down at her mammoth Sanyo computer with its green phosphorescent screen and began writing Alanya to Alanya.

Duchamp spent the next two years in a fever, writing the Marq'ssan Cycle. When she finshed it, she realized she didn't know how to market it to publishers and decided that publishing some short fiction (which she had never tried to write before) would be helpful for getting her novels taken seriously. Her first effort at a short story was "Welcome, Kid, to the Real World," which she wrote in the summer of 1986. Her next effort, however, turned into a novel. (Getting the hang of the shorter narrative form was a lot harder than she'd anticipated.) So she decided to stick with novels for a while. When in fall 1987 a part-time job disrupted her novel-writing, she took the short stories of Isak Dinesen for her model, tried again, and wrote "Negative Event at Wardell Station, Planet Arriga" and "O's Story." And in 1989 she sold "O's Story" to Susanna J. Sturgis for Memories and Visions, "The Forbidden Words of Margaret A." to Kristine Kathryn Rusch for Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, and "Transcendence" to the shortlived Starshore. Her first pro sale, though, was "Motherhood, Etc." to Bantam for the Full Spectrum anthology series.

After that she wrote a lot of short fiction (mostly at novelette and novella lengths), a good deal of which she sold to Asimov's SF. In the late 1990s Nicola Griffith convinced her to try her hand at writing criticism and reviews. In 2004, Duchamp founded Aqueduct Press; since then editing and publishing books (her own as well as other writers') has claimed the lion's share of her time and effort.

She lives in Seattle.

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm afraid this won't be a terribly useful review. I read this too long ago now to do it justice. But from what I recall, there were lots of things to think about, and new ways of looking at things. And lots of smart people were writing about smart stuff.

Some of it was about how history is shaped by narrative. And several of the contributors were history scholars.

And um.. some other stuff.

I did get one comment while reading this book about the heart on the cover. I'm still a bit baffled by that heart myself.

[Pamster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Particularly loved Andrea Hairston's "Stories are More Important than Facts: Imagination as Resistance in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth."