Reading Narrative

Abstract

We found in the previous chapter that one possibility amongst the interpretations that Fight Club invites is that the film is therapeutic because of its pastiche of therapy. It incorporates a narrative of forms of therapy in which people tell the story of, or ‘restory’, their lives, and of a possibly obsessed fascination with such ‘storying’; and against what might be the fantasies not only of consumerism but of therapy itself, it offers its own possible story of a reclaiming of masculinity within a society that has turned men into repressed losers and empty consumers; but at the same time this is a story whose grotesqueness allows a teasing equivocation between tranquilized absorption of Hollywood violence and a faltering, deconstructive parody of that genre, including its narrative of masculinity. In this chapter we look more directly at the ways in which narrative itself has come to be selfconsciously adopted as a form of therapy and as a method of research, the theorisation of which partly draws upon the widespread acknowledgement within philosophy of the narrative structure of human experience — for example, in Paul Ricoeur, Alasdair Maclntyre and Charles Taylor — but also identifies itself sometimes with deconstruction. We begin by considering accounts of these practices, in therapy and research.

Very well, then, I am large, I contain multitudes

(William Carlos Williams)