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Adventures in Narrative Theory · Mar 12, 11:13

David Graeber, Lost People, pp 131-132.

. . . the more exalted a group or status, the more their typical activities will tend to take dramatic form, once which lends itself to being told as stories afterward. The political domain is usually the most dramatic of all.

Another way to say this is that the more powerful a person or group, the more their archetypal activities are likely to resemble games. Many years ago, Johan Huizinga (1940) suggested that any number of common human activities tend to be organized like games. Games, he pointed out, are always characterized by certain basic features. There is always a (a) field of action, which is arbitrarily marked off from the rest of the world in space and time, (b) arbitrary rules, which apply within that field, and (c) a series of players, whose actions are motivated by (d) some goal they are not certain to attain.

What I find especially interesting about this forumlation is that its basic features preciely parallel a certain tradition of thinking about the relation of narrative and human action, one which goes back to Aristotle, reappears in Bakhtin, and whose most notable recent exemplar is probably Paul Ricouer. A story, according to this tradition, begins by posing some problem and ends with its resolution. Stories too are always characterized by certain features. There is always (a) a world, or field of action, marked off in space or time , (b) certain arbitrary rules which define the sorts of action possible in them. There are also necessarily, (c) a set of actors, and (d) some goal, which motivates them, but which they are not guaranteed of being able to attain. The two models have exactly the same form.

This not only makes it easier to understand what it means to say that certain types of action are intrinsiclally “narrativizable”; it also provides a clue as to why such narratives can serve as such powerful instruments of ideology—that is, why they not only determine who is an actor and who is not, but make it easier for those whoare not to accept this situation.”