Life as Narrative

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2007.00275.x

Life as Narrative

Bernard Williams

We dream in narrative, day-dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope,despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticise, gossip, learn, hate and love bynarrative. The words are Barbara Hardys, and they are quoted with approval byAlasdair MacIntyre, whose use of the idea of narrative to shed light on humantransactions and human lives I take as a point of departure.1 MacIntyre himselfwrites: Narrative is not the work of poets, dramatists and novelists reflectingupon events which had no narrative order before one was imposed by the singeror the writer: narrative form is neither disguise nor decoration. In actual life, weare the co-authors (but only the co-authors) of the stories of our lives: stories arelived before they are toldexcept in the case of fiction.2

MacIntyre applies this idea at three distinct levels. There is the level, first, ofintelligible action. An action is intelligible if, and only if, it can be situated in anarrative setting. Moreover, it is a mistake to think that some actions happen tobe intelligible, while others are not: the notion of an intelligible action is theprimary notion, and unintelligible actions are ones that fail to be intelligible. Thusnarrative history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential genre forthe characterisation of human actions.3 When I perform actions, engage inconversations and other human transactions, I am a character in a narrative ofwhich I am in part the author.

The account in terms of narrative applies, further, at the level of living. Humanbeings turn out to be in their actions and practice, and not just in their fictions,essentially story-telling animals. But the narrative I construct for myself has to bepart of a larger narrative enterprise, reaching beyond myself. This is one reasonwhy I am only co-author of the narrative. It means, too, that in deciding what todo, I must consult my narrative environment. I can only answer the questionWhat am I to do? if I can answer the prior question Of what story or stories doI find myself a part?. This is because we enter society with one or moreimputed charactersroles into which we have been drafted, as MacIntyre ratherthreateningly puts it.4

The story of which I am part will offer, among other things, the story of mylife. So, finally, narrative provides not merely an account of the process of living:it also provides the basis of the unity of a life. A whole life gets its sense from itssuccess in embodying or presenting a coherent narrative; the idea of coherenceappropriate to a life, in fact, is that of a narrative. When MacIntyre writes theunity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest,5 I take it that the largeambiguity of his statement is to be resolved in favour of his meaning the quest fora narrative, rather than the narrative of a quest. For he seems to agree that a life

European Journal of Philosophy 17:2 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 305314 r 2007 The Authors Executors. Journal compilationr Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,MA 02148, USA.

might fail to achieve unity, and if so, his idea must surely be that it will present afailed or broken narrative, rather than the coherentindeed, perhaps the entirelyunifiednarrative of a failed quest for something else.

When MacIntyre says that actions have a narrative structure, and that thestructure is not merely imposed by poets, dramatists and novelists in theirtelling, we have to ask why these people in particular are introduced, whatspecific role they represent. Are they introduced because they tell, specifically,fictions? Or because they tell in an artful way?in which case they might haveincluded historians as well. Or because, merely, they tell?in which case theymight include any of us story-telling animals. When MacIntyre says that thenarrative structure of actions is prior to these peoples narrations, does he meanthat it is prior to fictional narration, to any artful narration, or to any telling at all?

The last of these options is very hard to understand. Philosophers havedisagreed, indeed still do, about the sense and the extent to which causality isprior to human explanation. With regard to many causal claimsthe claim forinstance that craters on the moon are due to meteorite impactwe canreasonably accept that that is how things are, whether there was anyone to tellthe tale or not. We can extend that idea to some proto-narratives, in the sense ofdescriptions of temporal sequences of events linked by causality, which serve asexplanations: when we explain, for instance, that the mountains of the Auvergneare shaped like that because they used to be volcanoes, or why there aremarsupial species in Australasia and hardly anywhere else. If the story we tell isa good explanatory tale, what makes it a good tale is independent of the telling,in the sense that if it is true, things would have been so even if there were neverany narrators. But it is hard to extend that picture of things to cover claims aboutthe essentially narrative understanding of complex human actions and the livingof lives; there, what makes a given story a good story cannot be altogether priorto any telling at alleven if it may be prior to the telling of that particular story.One respectby no means the only onein which the narrative structure ofcomplex human agency could not be entirely prior to narration, in the sense ofmere telling, is that it could not be entirely prior to telling by agents themselves.This, surely, is what MacIntyre means. So when he says that narrative structure isprior to narrations by novelists and so forth, he does not mean that narrativestructure is prior to any telling at all, but that artless telling is prior to artfultelling, or factual telling is prior to fictional, or both.

Yet isnt there a problem even with the relatively unambitious claim that theideas of complex human actions and of the unity of a life have to be explainedthrough the possibility of narrative? A narrative is a story about a temporalsequence of happenings. There can be many different ways in which a story,although about different happenings, may yet have a unity or be (in the mostextended sense) about one thing. For instance it might be about a sequence ofhappenings at one place, or it might be the story of a penny. In the case of themarsupials, it will be a story about a piece of the earths surface. Among thesestories are some, each of which could claim to be the story of one persons life.But we could not identify those narratives unless we had a conception of a

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r The Authors Executors 2007. Journal compilation r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007

persons life, and recognized from that conception what the story of such a thingmight be like: any more than we could recognize a story about a penny unless weknew, more or less, what a penny was. Hence our conception of a persons lifecannot be derived from such a narrative.

Story of one persons life cannot pick out a narrative by purely formal orsyntactic criteria. It could not be a type of narrative, for instance, defined by therecurrence of a personal proper name: personal proper name is not a syntacticcategory, and the question of the appropriate reference of such a name raises thesame problems again. In any case, if the idea of such a narrative is supposed toimply some appropriate notions of coherence, we need more than the recurrenceof what we have somehow identified as a personal proper name: perhaps HCEin Finnegans Wake is a personal proper name, but its use there does not invitethose notions of coherence.

It seems that we could not use the idea of narrative to model a persons lifeunless we could independently pick out a person; and since what is in question isa persons life, a sequence (at the very least) of what happens to him or her, weneed to have that notion as well. Indeed, it is reasonable to think that this is not aseparate requirement, and that we would not even have a notion of a personunless we had some idea of what it is for a person to lead a life.6

This is the first part of an argument against MacIntyres claim. But it istempting to go a stage further, and extend the argument. It is not merely that weneed to have already some idea of a persons life; we need to have already an ideaof the coherence of a persons life. (This is the second part of the argument.) How,it may be asked, could we gather from certain kinds of narrative certain forms ofcoherence supposedly appropriate to peoples livesas opposed to other ways inwhich narratives can hang together or make senseunless we were guided bysome antecedent notion of coherence, given to us by our understanding of ourown and other peoples lives? If we get the same result with that question as wedid with earlier questions of the same kindthat is to say, if it turns out thatwe can understand the coherence given in the narrative of a life only because wealready understand the coherence of a lifethe analogy of narrative is not goingto provide anything very important. We shall have had to assume before we getto it most of what it is supposed to provide.

MacIntyre sees that some questions of this kind are raised, but he thinks thatthey are answered by speaking of mutual presupposition among theseconceptions: we understand the idea of a narrative about a person because weunderstand what a person is, but we also understand what a person is becausewe have the idea of a narrative about them. But this seems to me to fail inexplanation: we need more structure than this gives us, if we are to see whatthese dependencies might be. Moreover, and more substantively, unless we havea better grasp of how these ideas hang together, we shall not know how to facein particular, we shall not be able to decide how far we should acceptsome verysceptical consequences that are often associated with these uses of the idea ofnarrative. It is a banality to say, with regard to any complex subject matter, thatthere are no definitive narratives; that each is perspectival and perhaps

Life as Narrative 307


incommensurable with others; that narratives are constructed, not discovered. Tothe extent that these consequences roll in, the supposed priority of fact overfiction will turn out not to have much substance to it. There are some particularworries (I am going to suggest later that they are largely justified) about thestatus of the coherence that is given to a life by a narrative structure; we need toask whether the inevitability that may be conveyed by a narrative, and thecapacity of narratives to represent some developmental sequences as coherentwhile others seem arbitrary or inexplicable, may not express some other, external,kinds of constraint, tacitly appealing to a power which is not simply thatifthere could be such a thingof the truth. MacIntyre himself does not discussthese concerns, and shows a remarkably robust faith in the determinacy ofnarrative interpretations of at least some peoples lives. But we will not knowhow far we can agree with him unless we do some more to spell out thesedependencies.

I think that MacIntyre can up to a point answer the argument against him, butonly at the cost of some substantial concessions. The first part of the argument, asI called it earlier, can be met by conceding that the narrative paradigm does notreach all the way down to the most elementary levels of understanding what aperson is and what it is for a person to act. The narrative paradigm applies morestrongly to human and personal affairs to the extent that they are more sociallyand temporally complex. Persons are human beings, and human beings areanimals, and while every one of their intentional actions is touched by culture,some are simpler and invite (or may permit) less interpretative depth than others.So in the order of explanation, and to some extent in the order of learning as well,we start with a simple idea of a person and a simple idea of an action, which wecan identify without an appeal to narrative structure. These help to form ideas ofcomplex actions which indeed demand and rest on the idea of a narrative; but wealready have a schematic conception of what such a narrative would look like,and of how it would present a complex action by one person over time, suchas building a house.7 (The whole thing is an example of the familiar process ofboot-strapping.)

So also with the idea of a persons life. Starting with the ideas of a personssimple and complex actions, and a purely structural idea of their life, given in thefirst instance by the extent of their biological existence, we can conceive a spacewhich will indeed be filled only by narrative structures.

What about the constraints of coherence? What I called earlier the second partof the argument insisted that we needed some idea of the coherence of a lifebefore we could know how to deploy narrative in order to articulate it. Thissecond part of the argument, however, seems to me not to follow. The most thatwe can properly demand is that, before we apply narratives conceptions ofcoherence to a life, we must have some grasp of the material to which thoseconceptions are to be applied. We must have a conception of what invitesinterpretation in these terms. This material will itself no doubt involve complexactions and in various ways use the resources of less ambitious, shorter term,narratives. But the fact that we have this material may do very little in itself to



determine what we expect the coherence of a life to be; it may leave it very largelyopen what the resources of interpretation are, and where they come from.

This picture is enough, I think, to answer the claim pressed by the second partof the argument against MacIntyre: the claim, that is to say, that it cannot possiblybe true that the idea of the coherence of a life is to be found essentially innarrative, since we could not identify the right kind of narrative without alreadyhaving the idea of a coherent life. The answer is that we do not need to recognizethe coherence of a life in advance of its interpretation in narrative, because we arenot simply given a life and its narrative coherence. We are given (or, by the earlierprocesses, construct) the material about which questions of coherence can beasked, and those questions may indeed be answered in terms of a narrative andits coherence.

But just because we are not simply given a life and its narrative coherence, weare also not automatically provided with an answer to the sceptical doubts thatare readily raised by accounts in terms of narrative, particularly at this level. Itmay emerge that in giving MacIntyre an intelligible theory, we have at the sametime left it open to the sceptical doubts, and also, perhaps, taken away from himany substantive claim that fact is prior to fiction. Here, at the level of narrativeinterpretation of a whole life, the most interesting questions are about the sourcesof these interpretations; their standing; and their relations to fiction. The rest ofthis discussion will be concerned with these questions.

At three different points in his book The Thread of Life Richard Wollheim refersto an admirable remark of Kierkegaards, from his Journal for 1843:

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understoodbackwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be livedforwards. And if one thinks over that proposition, it becomes more andmore evident that life can never really be understood in time simplybecause at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting pointfrom which to understand itbackwards.

Kierkegaard says that I am never in a position to understand my life in the onlypossible way, backwards, and hence life cannot be understood in time; but thatcannot follow, unless we make another assumption (congenial indeed toKierkegaard) that if anyone could understand my life in time, it would bemyself. Perhaps I, for Kierkegaards very powerful reason, can never understandmy life properly in time, because I can never be in the position to give theretrospective narration of it; but others might. But then a fundamental questionarises, of what the relation is supposed to be between the coherence of my lifeand my way of living it. How does the final story of my life stand to the questionsI ask myself and the reflections I make in the course of living it?

MacIntyre, to turn back once more to his account, suggests an account of thisrelation which is radically, and revealingly, mistaken. In a passage that I quotedearlier, he suggested that I can answer the question What am I to do? only if Iknow of what story or stories I am part. But how am I supposed to know what



stories I belong to, except by deciding what I am going to do? If it is my story, thatis the way in which I decide how it is to continue. MacIntyres implication wasthat there can be, to some extent, an independent answer to the question, becausesociety had cast me: deciding what I should do is discovering who I am supposedto be, what character in fact I am.

An example that MacIntyre gives of the narrative significance of a life (andincidentally of his confidence that there are right answers about such things) doesnot make this answer seem appealing, or even fully intelligible. He points out8

that there have been several accounts of Thomas a` Beckets career, which assignit, in effect, to different genres. In some medieval versions, it belongs tohagiography; in an Icelandic poem Becket appears as a saga hero; while DomDavid Knowles treats his life as a tragedy, that of his relations to Henry II.Knowles, according to MacIntyre, is clearly right. There are several odd featuresof this account: for instance, that although fact is supposed to be prior to fiction,these possibilities for interpreting the life of an actual man are drawn fromfiction. Moreover, it is unlikely that those possibilities would all have beenunderstood by Becket. But the most basic point is that even if Beckets life wereuniquely well described in Knowles terms, that could tell us nothing at all abouthow he lived it. He certainly did not live it by asking, when considering what todo, how to carry on the tale of one locked in a tragic relation to his king. Perhapssomeone, not Becket, could do thatbut his story would not be a tragedy, butrather (in the way described in another work referred to by MacIntyre, The 18thBrumaire of Louis Napoleon) would have already moved on to farce.

People can of course live their lives by reference to fiction, and there are manymore, and less, interesting ways of coming to grief in that project than EmmaBovarys or Don Quixotes. But that could not provide theway of living a life. Noris it merely that we cannot impose narrative coherence upon our lives byconsciously referring to existing fictions: the point goes much farther than that.Although at first it seemed surprising that MacIntyre should appeal, in Becketscase, to narrative paradigms drawn from fiction, when he has insisted that fact isprior to fiction, this appeal in fact reveals what his idea is. He indeed believes thatthe unity of an actual life is like the unity of a fictional lifethat is what makesnarrative the grounding conception for both of them. The priority of fact overfiction consists only in this: that the unity is found first in life, and is carried overfrom life to the construction of fiction. But this conception must be wrong: there isa deep disanalogy between the situation of a person living his life and anyfictional character. It lies in the ingenuous but significant point that fictionalcharacters are not living at all. MacIntyre engagingly says that fictional charactersshare with us the limitation that they do not know the future. It is of course truethat they do not (standardly) know the future, for the boring reason that that ishow they are represented. But there is a more basic reason why they do not knowtheir future, and this they do not share with us at all: that they have no future,that all of them is already there. When the reader starts, and in that sense whenthey start, they are already finished.9 Moreover, the fact that we are conscious ofthis, and indeed conscious of how the characters finish, presents no obstacle to



our reading. Our experience of them, and in works of any real interest, our fullestexperience of them, is of characters who will finish in that way.

The life of a fictional character is necessarily something that our lives are not,a given whole. However coherent or incoherent in everyday terms their lives maybe represented as being, they have a special unity that no real life can have, thatthe end of them is present at their beginning. This peculiar unity of their livescannot help us in trying to find coherence in our own. It is essential to fictionallives that their wholeness is always already there, and essential to ours that itis not.

It is tempting to put this by saying that for a fictional character there are nounrealized possibilities.10 There is a boring falsehood in that, which mirrors theboring truth that in the fiction a character is represented as having a future. In thesense that Pip, when he first runs into Magwitch, is a boy to whom many thingsare going to happen, he is a boy to whom many different things may happen, andequally at the end he is a man to whom other things might have happened. But inthe fundamental sense in which the Pip of Great Expectations is a given whole,there is nothing else (it is tempting to say) that he might have been except whathe is. Yet this, again, seems not quite right. Even though it may be an unhelpfulkind of speculation, there is sometimes room for the idea of how the fiction mighthave gone otherwise; and in the case of serials, and a succession of workspresenting the same character, there is practical room for it. To that extent, Pip, or(less interestingly) Sherlock Holmes, might have been rather different.

One may say, of course, that in that case there would have been no suchcharacter as Pip, and Dickens would have created a different character. (It is whatLeibniz said about Gods creation of an actual person: it is significant that, forLeibniz, actual people are a species of possible people, and the end of a possiblepersons life (as it is called) is, in the real order of things, timelessly co-existentwith its beginning.) It is not clear to me how helpful it is to insist on that, butwhether we say it or not, it is clear that this dimension of literary possibility givesus no help at all in developing any notion of coherence that can be applied to ourown lives. We shall say that Pip might have gone a different way only if thedifferent way would have been in Pips style; and our notion of Pips style can bederived, again, only from the Pip we have got, the completed whole, and that isexactly what, in our own case, we do not have.

In some cases more than one style may be associated with one and the samecharacter, appearing in different works. The Odysseus of Sophocles Ajaxdisplays characteristics different from those of Odysseus in Sophocles Philoctetes.They are, in a sense, the same character, because they are both, in ways that theaudience understood, Homers Odysseus, and that is an important fact abouteach of them. But they are not one character with a variable style, because itmakes no sense to add these works together, even to the extent (and that isproblematical) that it makes sense to see the Oedipus at Colonus as presenting uswith the old age of the Oedipus who was Tyrannus. This shows again the primacyin literature of the given whole: the difference in style of those two figures ofOdysseus is given to us only by the given whole that is each of them.



There is nothing in any of this for understanding our life as we live it. Theremay seem to be various possibilities, but none of them is helpful. To consult thestyle of an existing literary character is an eccentric possibility, but it is not aparadigm of living ones life. To consult, rather, a style which will be, finally,ones own personal style, in just the sense that a fictional character may have astyle, is impossible, precisely because, unlike the lives of those characters, my lifeis not a given whole. All that is left is that one should consult what (as it seems toone) has so far emerged of ones final style. This may be a recognizabledescription of some reflective thought, but it would have to be a delusion tosuppose that it embodied the basic reflection involved in living. For if any suchstyle has begun to emerge, then it has done so in ones actions and in ones first-order considerations of what to do; it has not (and necessarily not) emerged up tonow in reflections on the style in which one does those things. If that same style isto continue to emerge, then it might be expected to do so in the same way, infurther actions and first-order considerations, rather than be altered by thisreflection into the clearly different style that consists principally of thinking aboutones style.

The given whole of a fictional character does present us, I have suggested,with a peculiar unity, which consists in its end being there with its beginning; justfor this reason, that unity is not available to us. However, in more everyday termsthat may indeed invite comparison with reality, the fictional life need not be toany notable degree coherent. A life narrated in fiction may be even morepicaresque, episodic, disjointed and arbitrary than an actual life, and, unlike anactual life, there is no chance of looking for further material to make more senseof it. Even if we lack any overall picture that is notably coherent, we may ofcourse think that we understand to some extent how the character is supposed tohave got from one stage to the next, and that we have some insight into what itwould be to live such a life. But those insights do not primarily rely on ideasdrawn from completed narrations. They demand only a conception of what it isto be at a certain point and to think, if only on a small scale, about how to moveon from there. That is a conception of living a lifeindeed, it is the conception ofliving a life; but it does not specially depend on conceptions of narration, whetherfictional or not.

What this has shown, if it is right, is that the idea of a completed, unified, orcoherent narration is of no help in leading a life. The idea of living as a quest fornarrative is baseless. Yet it is no doubt true that in understanding peoples livesabove all, other peoples livesnarratives that give them a certain direction ormeaning are very important: the story of someones life might for instance be thenarrative of a quest. But this invites, finally, the sceptical problem. If a particularand significant narrative structure can plausibly be applied to a life retro-spectively and from outside, and yet the person whose life it was could not,typically, have lived it with the aim of its embodying that structure, where doesthe plausibility, the fit, come from? It seems like magic.

There are only two possible lines of answer to this problem. One is that,although the agent could not consciously direct his life to live out that narrative,



nevertheless the considerations that appealed to him at various stages of his lifeand which moved him to act were appropriate to such a narrative: they weredrawn from a repertoire of stories defining recognizable, perhaps acceptable,lives. The other line is that the narrative is a fiction, the power and plausibility ofwhich lies in such things as its resemblance to familiar stories, its capacity to helpus make sense of some larger set of events, or its reassurances that there can besome immanent meaning, if no more, in the totality of our variously improvisedmoves from one set of circumstances to the next. The two lines cannotconsistently both be pressed all the way together, but they can be mixed, evenin the case of one life.

The types of scepticism invited by these two lines are rather different. The firstis primarily a scepticism about the considerations that help to shape ones life,and the extent to which they are part of a conventional repertoire of which one isnot fully conscious. To the extent that they are, a narration of ones life as unifiedin these terms may well be appropriate, but its appropriateness might come as anunpleasant surprise to one. The second form of scepticism leaves the consi-derations that shape ones life in the disorderly state that is natural to them, andattacks the supposed coherence and unity that narration can give to peopleslives.

There is surely a good deal of room for both forms of scepticism, but less room,as I have already said, for both at once. My own hope is that the second form ismore important than the first. We have a much greater interest, as it seems to me,in living a life that is our own and in having an adequate grasp, at the time, of theconsiderations that at various stages direct it, than we do in the ambition that itshould genuinely present a well shaped tale to potential narrators of it.11

Bernard Williams

NOTES

1 MacIntyre 1981: ch. 15: quotation at p. 197 from Hardy 1968.2 MacIntyre 1981: 197.3 MacIntyre 1981: 194.4 MacIntyre 1981: 201.5 MacIntyre 1981: 203.6 Wollheim 1984 is built round this claim, in the particular form of emphasizing the

living of a life.7 MacIntyre is wrong to reject the discussion of basic actions, by Davidson and many

others, as misguided given the importance of narrative. My point is that, on the contrary,the latter can be got going only given (something like) the former. It is true, however, thatsome work in basic action theory has neglected the many ways in which complex actionsgo beyond conjunctions of basic actions.

8 MacIntyre 1981: 198.



9 Genuine serials (as opposed to serializations), such as TV soap operas, are a partialexception, and it is a commonplace that they can generate a startling ambivalence in someviewers, who care passionately about what is to happen to a character and show itsometimes by trying to persuade the writers to take the story in one direction rather thananother.

10 Alexander Nehamas presents a very strong version of this claim in his applicationof related ideas to the thought of Nietzsche: see Nehamas 1985, esp. ch. 6.

11 [This is the unrevised text of a talk which Bernard Williams gave in the late 1980s, inBerkeley, to the editorial board of the journal Representations and which he never preparedfor publication. We are grateful to David Heyd, who obtained a copy of the talk, fordrawing it to our attention.Adrian Moore and Patricia Williams (Bernard Williamsliterary executors).]

REFERENCES

Hardy, B. (1968), Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach through Narrative, Novel, 2:514.

MacIntyre, A. (1981), After Virtue. London: Duckworth.Nehamas, A. (1985),Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Wollheim, R. (1984), The Thread of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



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Life as Narrative