How Can Narratives Change the Lives of Beings?

Nancy Murzilli

A shared narrative.

Over and above artistic fiction, for some time now I’ve been interested in all those ways of producing fiction that nourish reality and transform it – what I call our ordinary fictions. These are the fictions that we constantly produce on a daily basis to project our future, to experiment – whether it’s playing with our children, the way we talk to our dead, our imaginary friends, going to see a fortune teller who will draw the tarot for us…

Re-capacitating our collective creation to produce narratives.

My idea is to re-encapacitate a faculty that we all share, which is that of producing narratives and which is not the privilege of artists. To build on this shared critical capacity and trust the audience-readers to continue the initial work.

Co-construction and co-responsibility for the story.

Entering into a real conversation between the person who produces and the spectator/reader who receives, with his or her imagination.

Reformulate for an original story.

When we start by talking to a fortune teller or tarot reader, we come up with a question that we rephrase and we draw cards at random. And that’s when a story begins to emerge that tells us something about ourselves – through the intermediary of the cards, which are arranged randomly because they are drawn at random. It could be about the past, the present or the future. It’s a story with real drama and real tension. 

The predictive and divinatory narrative.

Dramatic tension transforms our lives. From artistic fictions, from a film or a book, we make connections with our own experience. This can be described as the predictive and divinatory nature of fiction.
Fiction acts but we cannot anticipate how. Because it escapes us, from the moment we deliver it. The spectators/readers then take hold of it – personally – by pursuing this fiction that they adapt to their own lives. 

Responsibility for the story.

The responsibility that every scriptwriter/author has is to know that the fiction is going to escape them because it is going to be shared. The scriptwriter/author is not in control. They do not have the ability to pull all the strings, but to weave the starting point for a story that will continue and be constructed outside their control.

The story as a succession of risks.

Writing is a constant risk-taking exercise, even more so when you publish a book or make a film: being confronted with the risk of the absence of the spectator-reader, of the support of the producer-publisher.
We are always on the razor’s edge as authors. And as humans, in our daily lives: every choice is a risk. Deciding to study in Rennes or Nantes means, in a way, changing your life completely, because you may meet someone new in love, friendship or work

Depositing the story.

Stories are deposited in us and we take charge of them. A deposited story also exists in itself and is deposited – between us -, forming a basis for the construction of something else, another story.

David Le Breton

The end of the grand narratives?

Our era corresponds to the end of the grand narratives in contemporary Western societies.
The grand narratives were religious narratives, but also political narratives about a better tomorrow and narratives inherent in class and regional cultures, which fuelled an understanding of relationships with the world.

Narratives & reality(ies)

Fiction is in no way opposed to reality. Our stories interweave reality and give it power, meaning and values. They enable us to communicate with each other.

Storytelling gives meaning to life.

Putting the sometimes confusing episodes of our lives in order to record the lines of direction that have been at work in the development of the person we are.

A story to nourish our relationship with the world. 

We never stop asking questions about the world. Yet our societies – from the 90s onwards – have experienced a kind of individualistic withdrawal that has become ever greater. In fact, today we could talk about hyper-individualism, with an unprecedented proliferation of stories, small stories that are generally only of value to oneself, spread across social networks that create fewer and fewer social links.

A story to give you a taste for life.

The desire to live when you understand the order of your personal journey. When, on the other hand, we have difficulty establishing coherence in our lives, we are much less in tune with this zest for life and therefore more at odds with the world.

Multitudes.

From the worlds of fiction to anthropology, narrative gives us a multiplicity of possibilities for living. A multiplication of possible versions of ourselves.
Multiplying, because we all, of course, have the feeling of being enclosed within ourselves, in a universe that is too limited and with this temptation to go elsewhere, to the extreme elsewhere, even.

Everything is fiction.

As an anthropologist, I’m absolutely anti-Bourdieusian. There is no objectivity in the world, only interpretations of the world around us. So there are countless points of view being exchanged. The whole history of literature lies precisely in the history of these points of view on the world, this problematisation of the world that shows that, ultimately, there is no unity.

The story, a page-turning through us.

Every word, every image is a projective test. We can’t pretend to control the image, the paragraph in the text: we inevitably risk an interpretation, a value judgement of the other. This is precisely the risk of our profession as authors, in whatever form.
We are absolutely not the same people here as we were earlier – on the train or in a restaurant. There are countless people within us, and we mobilise them when we write fiction or social science or psychology.
There are as many selves as there are situations in which we are immersed.

Write a story to build an experience.
Tell a story to live an experience. 
A story is a way out, a way to exist.

When you’re writing, you’re presented with thousands of situations. Our job as writers is to create a plot, by answering the question: how can I process this material so that it becomes a narrative fiber that resonates with me and with the reader/spectator?
We are not – as scriptwriters – directors of conscience, potentially telling others what they should do, but rather triggering a step backwards, the ‘sideways step’ that allows us to question our own existence. 
For example, our relationship with the smile, the face, silence… as an echo, a resonance, not a direction. The desire to experience prevails in order to go beyond and touch: affectivity and tactility.
A fiction that opens the door to another experience.

“Je est un autre” – “I is another” Arthur Rimbaud 

We construct countless fictions about our lives, and we hunger for the fictions of others to find out where we stand in this infinite universe of people we have been, are, could have been…

A personal story as a fictional tangle. 

We’re always appropriating the stories of filmmakers, writers… We’re made up of all these fictions that make up our thinking about the world, our values. 
I have the impression that my life is made up of this endless tangle of thousands of films I’ve seen and books I’ve read. I live sequences of my life surprising myself by realising that I’m often really in a Fellini or Godard or John Ford film. Ricochets from everyday life into forms of fiction.

Reordering our personal fiction. 

Psychotherapy is a way of rewriting our history with the help of a therapist who asks us to better understand a particular past sequence, from our childhood for example. The same goes for teaching. We’re constantly transmitting frameworks and giving direction, not only by stimulating our students’ desire to read, but also by making them dream, no doubt, by telling them stories, anecdotes, moments when a particular researcher had the idea for a particular concept. 

The story as a way of projecting oneself.

Passing on stories to students, for example, to enable them to see themselves in the future and thus stimulate a vibrancy in their personal and future professional lives: if the story shared echoes and resonates with them, it can completely change their lives.

Writing as a re-entry into the world.

I think that in our writing there is a capacity to re-enter the world. Personally, this is what underlies and nourishes my relationship with writing. When I was a teenager, writing was my grip on the world, in a way, and my balance to keep me moving forward on the razor’s edge of adolescence, which I felt was never-ending. One day I came across a phrase by Elias Canetti that suited me perfectly. He wrote: ‘on the brink of the abyss, he clings to his pencils’. So that’s the story: the fiction we create about ourselves is also a way of saving ourselves. A fiction that can take very different forms from one moment to the next in our lives. With varying degrees of urgency, but always with the same inner need to write.

The story in a desire to ricochet.

Even if the other person isn’t there when we write, we have them constantly in mind, in a desire for ripples, and they also act as a relay. 
Evoking the divinatory leads me to evoke a shared power in co-constructing. 

To write is to set out on a journey.

Our relationship with the material of our story is one of questioning.
Let’s take the example of a street we walk down, which has a certain resonance. This material establishes a link with the semi-unknown: what I’m going to generate with it, what it’s going to bring me by guiding me. 
Writing is, in a sense, setting out on a journey. Through the process of questioning, we then ‘move’ the narrative that we are questioning like a body, through a triple prism like poles: intention, attention and tension. Moving in order to bring the narrative into play – its object and its recipient – by questioning it, to fully embrace fiction, since there is no single truth.

The narrative to provoke the unforeseeable.

The question of displacement is central: how do we displace, how do we change our mental patterns, how do we surprise, how do we introduce the unpredictable?
Surprise is absolutely fundamental: it opens us up to new emotions.

Narrative as meditation.

The point of fiction is to meditate on a reality that is, in any case, forever inaccessible to us, except in the case of police investigations, for example.
Responsibility in storytelling obliges us. You can’t just say whatever you like, thinking that it’s all a question of point of view. There has to be a minimum of consensus when we interpret the world, otherwise we risk polemics and conflict.
The richness of our daily lives lies in the fact that we are never finished interpreting an event in the world, and therefore never finished constructing inherent fictions that release a certain amount of energy so that the narrative is deposited with the spectator-reader and allows us to converse.

« We compose our personal narrative as a fictionalized tangle. We always appropriate the narratives of filmmakers, writers… We are made up of all these fictions that make up our thinking about the world, our values. From the ricocheting of everyday life to forms of fiction. » 

Aurélie Valat – scénariste (France/Grèce)

Hubert Allignol & Valérie Le Dorven

Shared responsibility for the story.
We hear the story on a daily basis: from the victim, the perpetrator and the witnesses, all of whom we must receive as faithfully as possible. 
The complexity lies in giving the person who confides in us the confidence to relate what they have experienced – which is not necessarily reality, but what they have perceived.
We are actors, spectators and writers all at the same time, and it is our duty – while freeing the person to speak – not to guide the person who is going to have to tell us their story. 
The responsibility is shared between us, who receive the words, and the person who comes to tell us, who is not necessarily ready to talk and, above all, to tell everything. It’s vital to build trust, and that’s what we do.

A story to structure, not to influence.

We are several investigators with a ‘handover’ to renew this bond, if it is not initiated. 
We have been trained and equipped to deal with children in particular: an interview room called Mélanie is dedicated to them, and we follow a special interview protocol: the NICHD protocol, which originated in Quebec. The Mélanie room allows us to refocus the child’s attention on what they have to say, on their story, without the constant disruption inherent in daily life in the police station. The NICHD protocol is a structured interview that defines the various activities and stages to be carried out with the child, as well as the questions to be asked, while leaving some initiative to the trained interviewer. We use it in particular to help re-formulate, not to influence so as not to suggest. The repercussions of potential suggestions within a story – which will ultimately be different – are extremely serious, with consequences that can include prison sentences for the people involved.

A personal account, to be protected.

To build trust – we create distance through emotional restraint, while showing empathy with the child, and the protocol helps us to do this. The protocol also leads us to ask the child to tell us about himself, enabling us to assess his level of vocabulary and the way he expresses himself, so that we can gradually practise understanding him. His story is inherent to his life path, his passions to get to the reason why we are hearing him. We then segment time to share the facts from beginning to end. The precise temporality helps us to come back and stimulate the sharing of as many details as possible. 
Finding the right moment, the right place.
The child’s words belong to them. 
We must be able to receive them and ‘put them down’, recording them scrupulously and controlling their reception: without breaking down or being shocked.

As well as building trust, we also need to distance ourselves.

Not allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed, being and remaining solid, is part of our daily work as support workers. 
We may need psychological support to deal with this delivery of the unbearable, with all this suffering, often upstream or from the moment the act is committed, right up to the judgment. This is an important stage, where emotions return once the story has been recorded. This is often the case in American films, where the police are often disgusted by the release of criminals on formal grounds, for example. There are fewer such cases in France, although they do exist.

Submitting the story to free the bodies.

Depositing the story for victims and perpetrators has an effect on people. It is said that they leave feeling, in a way, lighter. The story has made them relive what they have gone through, painfully, and never before have they told it in such detail, and never again will they give themselves away at this level and in this context. 
Put the story down and never take it away again.

Bodies inhabited by narrative.

The story allows us to be taken into consideration by society and by the courts as a victim, to be recognised in order to activate reparation, and a change then takes place within the body itself, as if another body were unfolding. Rebuilding ourselves.
We ourselves, by joining the juvenile brigade, our bodies change – not visually but internally: our bodies take on ‘something’ that marks us ‘with a red-hot iron’.

The violence of the story represented or suggested.

On the screen, in books, the question arises of how to represent the unbearable, the traumas, the violence, without necessarily resorting to hyper-archi-violent images that are shared in minute detail. We believe that the majority of individuals who make up society are not ready to receive these images of reality. Thrillers bring them together in their own way – as in James Ellyoy’s books, where the horror scenes are described with an acute precision that would be hard to find in the cinema, for example, or in the theatre.
The written word dissipates the virulence of reality to some extent, because you can potentially imagine something else visually with words. This is very complex with images that freeze. The question arises as to the usefulness of all this omnipresent violence on screen.