Narrative and the "New Ethnography"

Although I agree with what other students have said in critique of Kathleen Stewart's prose, I must also say that I really enjoyed her book.

First, I admire her project, which she positions within ethnographic history and methodology as a possible form with which to enact or perform a "new ethnography" (26). She wants to avoid searching for and presenting a perfect textual solution to cultural representation. Instead, she strives "to displace not just the signs or products of essentialism (generalizations, reifications) but the very desires that motivate academic essentialism itself--the desire for decontaminated 'meaning,' the need to require that visual and verbal constructs yield meaning down to their last detail, the effort to get the gist, to gather objects of analysis into an order of things" (26). Stewart's invocation of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men helped me understand her discussion of anthropology as cultural critique and her desire to flood us with details and stories and lyric images as a way of making the space at the side of the road real, without telling us what it means. (Just as William Roseberry asks us to examine Geertz in light of his own ambitions, it would be interesting to investigate Stewart's text through the lens of her own desires for it. Maybe this is something we can address in discussion.)

The next element that drew me into Stewart's project was her discussion of narrative, which made a bridge for me from Turner to this text, and helped deepen my sense of the interrelatedness of story and culture, and the power of story in general. Stewart writes that "narrative is first and foremost a meditating form through which 'meaning' must pass. Stories, in other words, are productive" and that "rather than complete or 'exemplify' a thought, narratives produce a further searching" (29, 32). I think this is true, certainly of the stories I love to read. Although tales and fables are kinds of narratives that are created to explain the world or prescribe behavior, I think that most stories give image and space to the gap between reality and meaning, not to the linear and hierarchical effort of assigning meaning to reality. When I listen to or read or tell or write a story, I am interested in dwelling in the "as if" and indeterminacy that Turner discusses--not in sealing up the certain, the walled, the named. I think the way that Stewart forms her own text--with the "imagine"s and the "picture"s and the slipping in and out of different kinds of speech and her reticence to classify or interpret her subjects' stories (though maybe she does this more than she thinks she does; and maybe she needs to, to reach us)--is to keep us within the gap, within the productive act of story and the searching that narrative ignites.

Later in the book Stewart writes, "In the inescapably mediated space of a narrated world it is as if the tension between talk and idea calls attention to itself, and the gap between word and world becomes an object of fascination, signaling mysterious effects and unforeseen possibilities ... 'Things that happen' are imbued both with the expectation of anomaly or chance occurrence and with the quality of revealed distinctions, overarching laws, and moral-mythic orders" (181). This got my attention because it sounds a lot like the "do"s in a fiction class: the ending must be surprising, and also inevitable. Moreover, Stewart addresses my gripe with meta-fiction and postmodern lit: though I can be charmed and seduced by the antics of calling attention to the textiness--to the createdness--of text, ultimately I'm satisfied by possibility, not disintegration. But I fear that this is a digression!

In the end, what strikes me most about the book are the lyric images still in my mind: Eva Mae walking the roads with a knife; the boy hanging from the wire with the flesh of his heel blown out; coffee and cigarettes on a table; the man who put his arm in a sling so as to create an explanation for signing an x instead of his name; Waylon Jennings in a truck; ghostly visitations; the woman who said no one, not even the preacher, could tell her not to wear pants. Am I romanticizing the hard times and poverty and violence of West Virginia through the musicality of the voices and images still in my head? I hope not. I do know I'm listening.

- Esme