Dangers of Narrative and Fictionality

Story-critical narrative theory

As pointed out by Hanna Meretoja,⁷ a ‘story-critical’ outlook has a long history in philosophy and literature, manifesting itself, for example, in the complete rejection of the narrative form in the French nouveau roman in the mid-twentieth century; or the postmodern deconstruction of grands récits – grand narratives – as once diagnosed by François Lyotard.⁸ Critical approaches to storytelling in social sciences are much more recent and are clearly related to the increased instrumentalization of stories of personal experience by political movements, journalism and corporate storytelling.⁹ As Maria Mäkelä and her team have demonstrated, in the contemporary story economy fuelled by social media, a story of disruptive personal experience becomes the most valued currency. A recognizable stock of ‘compelling’ stories of transformative encounters and personal struggles leading to an epiphany populates the public sphere and can be appropriated by any ‘storyteller’. Moreover, personal stories going viral often create disturbing and potentially harmful mismatches in representative and rhetorical scale: individual viral stories of experienced injustice affect political decision-making,¹⁰ while an individual citizen may at any moment become a viral emblem of human goodness or evil, her story appropriated for promoting whatever partisan view or social movement.

Both academic and lay criticism of such instrumentalized stories is made difficult by two narrative features. First, the strategic foregrounding of experientiality frustrates any attempt at fact checking: how can you refute another person’s experience? Second, the narrative affordances of social media transform individual experiences into representative exempla through sharing: once shared, an experience becomes collective and thus validated. In this regard, social media experientiality tends toward fictionality that is not intended, but simply results from the foregrounding of general relatability. As such, contemporary viral storytelling seeks legitimacy through moral rather than referential truthfulness, reminiscent of premodern storytelling cultures that recycled canonized exempla and did not differentiate between fact and fiction in the modern, generic sense. The crucial difference between, say, Medieval conversion stories as Christian exempla and personal stories going viral lies in the processes through which they acquire moral narrative authority. Whereas premodern exempla and the doctrines they carried originated in a top-down fashion – from pre-established religious, intellectual or political authority – the contemporary exemplum story gains its authority through the bottom-up mechanism of affective networks of users and algorithms granting personal experiences the status of moral truth.

What kind of ‘truths’ are we talking about, then? Francesca Polletta and Nathan Redman demonstrate in their recent comprehensive literature review that personal storytelling, while largely considered a driver of social change in contemporary Western societies, rarely alters people’s political views, particularly on structural issues such as economic inequality.¹¹ Social media as narrative environments amplify the conservative story logic of experiential narratives cementing the audience’s pre-existing conceptions, values and ideologies, as the push to create easily likable and shareable stories directs the storyteller to conform to familiar masterplots with easily recognizable moral positioning.¹²

While stories of personal, often disruptive experience are largely considered the primary currency in the contemporary story economy, accusations of sticking to and promoting one’s ideologically biased ‘narrative’ loom large within the contemporary public sphere and political debate. As Paul Dawson demonstrates in this volume,¹³ the popular uses of the terms ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ have a clear tendency to diverge: ‘story’ is still typically considered something authentic, positive and even emancipatory (quite in the spirit of the twentieth-century Civil Rights movements aiming at ‘giving voice’ to the oppressed through storytelling), while ‘narrative’ tends to refer to an ideologically biased position or construction of events. Yet social media polarization feeds on the link between authentic individual stories and biased collective narratives by way of the chain reaction from experientiality to representativeness and normativity. Even an unverified individual experience thus often ends up as a token in polarized story wars, either as a ‘true story’ supporting a partisan ‘narrative’, or as a ‘fiction’ emblematic of the falseness and dishonesty of the opposing camp.

The #metoo solidarity movement constitutes a compelling example of the complex representational, rhetorical, and ethical issues related to viral storytelling. Arguably the viral campaign, prompting users to simply identify with experience of gendered or sexual misconduct or abuse, was hugely influential in most Western societies and made such conduct considerably less socially accepted. What was remarkable was the participants’ pronounced abstinence from sharing full-blown experiential narratives. The mere narrative stance-taking constituted a sufficient ‘small story’¹⁴ to generate networked affect and solidarity that finally succeeded in concretizing and reflecting a structure of oppression. The dark moments of #metoo were invariably experienced due to full-fledged personal stories with potentially falsifiable storyworld particulars and a focus on individual motives and actions; the more experiential detail, the more likely an individual narrative was to end up weaponized in the hands of the social media backlash. Hanna-Riikka Roine analyses in her chapter of this volume a case of #metoo storytelling that takes the questions of the dominance of personal cum collective storytelling in social media, and the resultant problematic relation between relatability and fictionality, to their extreme: the New Yorker fictional short story ‘Cat Person’ by Kristen Roupenian that came to be read as a #metoo exemplary testimony by the affectively networked social media audiences.

The relationship between personal storytelling and ‘post-truth’ discourse is thus complex and challenges contemporary narrative theory in myriad ways. In public debate, stories supporting one’s pre-existing stances are typically considered compelling and illustrative, while those of heretics are deemed strategic, manipulative and ‘fictional’. Yet research by narratologists in the two above-mentioned research projects, Dangers of Narrative and Instrumental Narratives, attests that the elements often considered necessary for a compelling story – relatable storyworld particulars, disruptive experience and a clear moral – as such are susceptible to rhetorical and epistemic hazards that may actualize in collision with other forms, such as social media platforms promoting certain types of storytelling and audience engagement. Moreover, as proposed by these projects, contemporary storytelling cultures should be able to recognize the limits of narrative sensemaking and rhetoric; most familiar story formulae, foregrounding the personal and the disruptive, are ill-suited to communicate supra-individual structures and processes, or at least their storification requires particular narrative innovation.¹⁵

As an antidote to polarized discourses on ‘stories’ and ‘narratives’, and somewhat diverging from the philosophical debates between ‘narrativist’ and ‘anti-narrativist’ camps,¹⁶ the volume at hand does not focus on ideology or identity as ‘narrative’, but instead approaches the dangers of narrative and fictionality from a pronouncedly narratological-rhetorical angle, with an emphasis on contemporary narrative environments such as social media. Contemporary narrative theory is well-positioned to promote critical reading that looks beyond good intentions and the ideological lines dividing contemporary audiences.

Rhetorical fictionality theory

A rhetorical approach to fictionality separates the quality of fictionality from a one-to-one relationship with fiction as a genre. This means that we need to understand and define it independently of any single genre. In ‘Distinguishing Fictionality’, Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen and Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen suggest defining fictionality as ‘intentionally signaled invention in communication’.¹⁷ Defining a complex concept in only four words will often call for elaboration and clarification; and indeed, there are some provisos to fully reflect the pragmatic approach. First, fictionality is conceived of as the result of an assumption about the communicative act rather than as an ontology of the represented object.¹⁸ Second, the definition is meant to imply that fictional discourse is communicated as invented regardless of whether or not it coincidentally corresponds to facts in the world. Thus, an assumption about the invented status of a sentence like: ‘Once upon a time there was a caterpillar, who…’ does not hinge upon whether or not there was or is an actual caterpillar somewhere. Therefore, a more cumbersome version of the same approach is to say that: ‘A receiver will assume that a communicative act is fictional when he assumes that the sender has intentionally signaled that she wants it to come across as invented’. What this inevitably implies, however, is that the use of fictionality is always intentional. ‘No-one produces fiction by mistake’,¹⁹ as Richard Walsh has it. Similarly, it implies that fictionality is signaled or it is not fictionality. Without any signal of any kind – be it contextual, paratextual, based on genre conventions or semantic conventions, or shared socio-cultural horizons; nothing would prompt a receiver to an assumption that fictionality is in play. One consequence is that a concept of communication that does not entail assumptions about intentions is unintelligible from this perspective.

How does fictionality work in the service of misinformation or other nefarious purposes, then? In ‘Defining “Fake News”’, Edson C. Tandoc, Zheng Wei Lim and Richard Ling examined thirty-four academic articles that use the expression ‘fake news’.²⁰ The authors suggest a typology comprising six types: (1) news satire, (2) news parody, (3) fabrication, (4) manipulation, (5) advertising and (6) propaganda, and distinguish among them partly based on whether there is an ‘intention to deceive’.²¹ In her 2017 article, ‘Fake news. It’s complicated’, Claire Wardle distinguishes between seven types of fake news, one of which is ‘Satire or parody (“no intention to cause harm but has potential to fool”)’, whereas the remaining six are different examples of intentionally misleading communication.²²