Just a short post today, since Nancy and I will leave for Colorado tomorrow bright and early. Without straying into more formal literary theory, I'd like to say a little about how I read these living narratives that I find whenever people interact. These narratives may be implicit (no one's talking about an event) or explicit (a person recounts an event, or people recount an event, or talk about what's happening), but they do not have to be conversations expressly about the event: people can converse and, if one listens carefully, one can read their narratives even though implicit. More importantly, when I use "implicit" or "explicit" I'm not describing from some universal vantage point: rather, I mean the narratives are implicit or explicit in terms of ME. In fact, from inside the living narrative, implicit and explicit have little meaning: people speak with each other, live with each other, all the time crafting a narrative whether consciously or unconsciously that makes sense in light of their lives.
From my vantage point as reader, implicit narratives are the more difficult to trace but also the more valuable. For instance, I observe a particular phrase propagating through a group's conversation over the course of several days. Let's say the phrase is "that's over there" as in "though that may indeed happen, it hasn't yet and so we shouldn't count on it." As the phrase propagates and more members of the group use it, I can read that as becoming a part of the group's ethos and can follow up to probe it's depth of meaning. A more difficult instance is when a group has been together for some time and I, an outsider, happen to intrude on their narrative. Then the implicit elements become much harder to identify, because they may not only be implicit to me but also to the group itself. And for that very reason, when a reader does identify implicit elements to a narrative, they are unguarded and very revealing. Implicit narratives also appear in literature, but there they may be implicit because the author did not feel the need to make them explicit (such as the narrative about daemons in scripture discussed earlier) or because the author herself was not consciously explicating them. Granted, these are hard to distinguish.
Explicit narratives are much easier to trace, since someone is speaking to me directly and usually telling me something, though a person's language and manners are often riddled with implicit narratives that they may not be able to voice. Explicit narratives are also those that I participate in: though some elements may be hidden from me, I am willing to grant that I know what I'm doing when I craft a narrative, not in terms of skill, but in terms of recognizing that I'm participating. I think it's the same for everyone. Say two people in a long-term relationship are recounting their history, but disagreeing about an event or two. Though they may not know why they're disagreeing, they do know they're disagreeing and, if they reflect a bit, may be able to identify why they're disagreeing (e.g., not disputing a fact, but negotiating the meaning of a disputed fact). Literature is always, on the surface, explicit narrative: an author writes something consciously, deliberatively, though implicit narratives usually are present.
Now in terms of person, narratives are always first person (like the literary term): I did/am/think so and so. Even when narratives are in the form of second and third person, they're still first person: a person, the "I," says something about themselves (first person form) or about you (second person form) or about she/he/it (third person form), but the fundament is always first person, the narrator. I think this holds true for literature as well: the writer, the "first" person, is always the one telling the narrative, whatever form of person the narrative takes.
Personas are more tricky, being both first and second person since a persona is always engaged in a dialectic with another persona, in which a person negotiates the first person view with the second person view coming from the other person/persona. And personas are not simply verbal: one's manner of dress, speaking, eating, etc. all elements of that person's persona, shaped by inner desires/needs and by outer expectations/pressures. Further, personas often have a third person referent: what will do they think about me/us? In literary terms, the "implied author" is actually the author's persona as it can be derived from the narrative. The "way" I write this blog is little like the way I talk or preach or sing or dress, though some elements undoubtedly appear common to all. Particularly in this medium, when I write self-consciously I'm being sensitive to a third person referent, those who may perhaps read this blog.
In short (A lie! you say), "person" in terms of narratives refers to the form of explicit reference (a person speaks of I, you or he/she/it) while realizing these are always first person expressions. Yet, as I've argued before, "person" is actually irretrievable in narratives in terms of interiority: "person" refers to the form and source, not what's actually going on inside. In reading narratives, we're limited to data in the form of personas - social constructs that show a person's convictions regarding self-identity, other-identity, meaning, purpose, etc., but which fall short of the interior life of the actual person. When President Obama visits a GMC plant in Detroit, we do well to remember we're viewing a persona engaged in constructing a political and policy narrative with our own pesonas, with all the attendant, messy presumptions/assumptions/rhetoric that such a construction entails. President Obama may actually love Toyotas.
Well, I encourage you to think on these things in terms of the persona/ethos/God trialectic: avoiding phenomenology (for now), I'm attempting to analyze social constructs whose creation you, I, we and God together construct. Thank you for reading.
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