Adriana Cavarero
Storytelling and Action
Taken from The Human Condition, the following paragraph has the merit of illustrating in a few words the fundamental elements of Hannah Arendt’s original approach to the issue of narrative.
That every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a story with beginning and end is the prepolitical and prehistorical condition of history, the great story without beginning and end. But the reason why each human life tells its story and why history ultimately becomes the storybook of mankind with many actors and speakers and yet without any tangible authors, is that both are the outcome of action.1
On the one hand, by calling on the difference between story and history, she binds them together in a crucial knot: each individual life can be told as a story and. the web of these biographical narratives results in history intended as the storybook of humankind. On the other hand, she claims that both story and history, and therefore the narrative substance they consist of, are the outcome of action. In order to understand Arendt’s conception of narrative, it is thus necessary to briefly focus on her idea of action.
A central category in Arendt’s political thought, action reflects and reveals “the paradoxical plurality of unique beings” that characterizes the human condition. By interacting with others with words and deeds, “men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identity and thus make their appearance in the human world.”2 Through action, “we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance.”3 Action is ontologically rooted in the human condition of natality, and it reactivates the two crucial characteristics framing the event of birth: uniqueness and beginning of the newborn. By acting among others, actors and spectators in turn, we actively reappear as unique beings and beginners, thereby performing a distinctive activity “from which no human being can refrain and still be human”: a life without action, Arendt insists, is literally dead to the world and “it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men.”4 The emphasis on the link between action and the human is conspicuous. One must not forget that the category of uniqueness on which Arendt focuses in The Human Condition and elsewhere is a direct and confrontational response—in political, ontological, and ethical terms—to what she describes in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism as an unprecedented experiment to turn human plurality into a mass of superfluous beings “whose murder is as impersonal as the killing of a gnat.”5 The infernal laboratory of the extermination Lager was precisely aimed at the “killing of uniqueness,”6 she claims. Actually, the post-totalitarian perspective of Arendt’s political thought works as a premise to the way she reinterprets the main issues of Western tradition, narrative included. As far as story and history, in her view, are the outcome of action, they inherit and share the revelatory function of acting, that is, its power of displaying who the actor is, namely, his or her uniqueness related to the fact of human plurality. Significantly, this uniqueness does not correspond at all to the autonomous and self-consistent individual belonging to the modern tradition. The incarnated uniqueness Arendt speaks of is constitutively relational and totally exposed to others. Others are necessary in order for each human being to appear and reveal, express, and even exhibit his or her uniqueness by acting among them. “This disclosure of ‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is—his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide—is implicit” in action as interaction, Arendt argues. She crucially observes that, although “the unique and distinct identity of the agent” “is plainly visible” and disclosed to others in the actual event of its manifestation, it “retains a curious intangibility that confounds all effort toward unequivocal verbal expression.”7 In point of fact, “the moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is,” with the result that “his specific uniqueness escapes us.”8 It is precisely here that the special function of narrative comes to the fore and corroborates its structural bond with the sphere of action and therefore, in Arendtian terms, of politics as the shared space opened up by interacting. Contrary to other discursive registers that focus on what somebody is, narrative provides verbal expression to the who disclosed by the agent by telling his or her life story. Although Socrates did not write a single line and left no work behind, Arendt pointedly notices, “we know much better and more intimately who he was, because we know his story, than we know who Aristotle was, about whose opinions we are so much better informed.”9
The archetypical form of narrative as distinctive modality of discourse is biography, according to Arendt, and succeeds in two essential and concurrent tasks: on the one hand, it gives meaning to the various acts of self-disclosure of a unique life that “would otherwise remain an intolerable sequence of events,”10 and, on the other hand, it turns the unique and distinct identity that the agent, by acting among others, momentarily reveals, into a tangible—narratable, memorable, and lasting— life story.
Arendt gives particular attention to the long-lasting effect of biographical narrative. Action is indispensable for the human to be human, but it is fragile, contingent, and ephemeral. The disclosure of “the living essence of the person as it shows itself in the flux of action”11 doesn’t last: it lasts as long as the actual event of its manifestation. Conversely, because of its being tangible and transmittable, the story that narrates this very person’s unique identity does last. It even survives the doer. Not by chance do we still know who Achilles or Odysseus were: Homer, the first storyteller and historian of the Greeks, according to Arendt, bears witness to the power of narrative that contrasts the frailty of action by turning its revelatory but ephemeral character into long-lasting and even immortal stories. “Who somebody is or was we can know only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero—the biography, in other words,” Arendt notices, and she makes clear that, however, “the hero the story discloses needs no heroic qualities”: even in Homer the word “hero” “was no more than a name given to each free man who participated in the Trojan enterprise and about whom a story could be told.”12 The Homeric heroes are exemplary not because of their courageous behavior, but because they intentionally performed “great deeds”—memorable actions—worth of an immortal story, a story worth remembering and lasting among posterity. In fact, and in tune with the Greek view of human life’s ephemeral dimension, the immortality longed for by ancient heroes is totally immanent to the world and doesn’t transcend it: epic narrative belongs to a culture in which human beings are essentially concerned with fame in this world, a fame enduring among posterity, provided by the telling and retelling of stories that save them from oblivion. Tangible and transmittable stories immortalize in the human world the meaning of unique lives whose earthly sojourn is brief. They provide, so to say, a mundane and terrestrial form of redemption. In a world that exists before our appearance and lasts after our death, we are on stage for a short time. The transitory nature of existence or its awareness—which for the Homeric heroes resulted in a concept of action “highly individualistic, as we would say today”13 —is a common concern of human beings. If this is true, the heroic disposition toward immortal fame, although linked to a distinct age of Western tradition, could thus be taken as the emphatic expression of a “narratable self” that applies to each of us as unique and transient beings in search of a story.14 This means, in strict Arendtian terms, that a narrator is necessary in order for our personal story to be told.
Stories Have No Author
Everybody is the hero of his or her story, according to Arendt, and every life story has a hero, a protagonist. However, just like in the case of the Homeric heroes, it is not the hero that “makes” his story. Stories have no author—neither the protagonist nor the narrator: intentionally or unintentionally, they result from action and are what, by acting, we leave behind. To quote Arendt’s words, “the real story in which we are engaged as long as we live has no visible or invisible maker because it is not made,” and “the distinction between a real and a fictional story is precisely that the latter was ‘made up’ and the former not made at all.”15 Homer did not make up the stories of the heroes he recounted. He told the stories “produced” by their actions, specifically by their “great deeds” intentionally aimed at memorability. There is a substantially realistic vein in Arendt’s conception of narrative: stories are the direct outcome of action and they need storytellers to be told. The world is full of stories, she once said, that are just waiting to be told. This principle transcends the exemplary universe of ancient epic and strengthens the central clue of Arendt’s original thought: for both action and story, the others are necessary. This is why she thinks of life stories always in terms of biography and never in terms of autobiography.
Nobody ever knows who he or she is, even less so while in the midst of acting. Intermittent and contingent, action discloses the actor’s unique identity not to himself or herself but only to others, the spectators. In order to know who I am, I always need others: whether spectators, to whom I actively, though occasionally, reveal my distinctive uniqueness through action, or the narrator, who, by telling my life story, gives shape to my personal identity through words and makes it tangible and long-lasting. The passage from the embodied uniqueness’ momentary disclosure within the flux of action and its tangible permanence in narrative form is crucial to Arendt. “The unchangeable identity of the person, though disclosing itself intangibly in act and speech, becomes tangible only in the story of the actor’s and speaker’s life,” she asserts, and, by paying perhaps an excessive tribute to the ancient Greeks and their concern with mortality, she argues that “the essence of who somebody is can come into being only when life departs, leaving behind nothing but a story”16 that is only after the hero’s death. This last sentence is noteworthy for several reasons. First, because it casts an insightful light on the story’s intriguing double link with two categories that play a different if not opposite role in Arendt’s speculation: natality and mortality. A new and unusual category within the history of philosophy, natality is featured by Arendt as the fundamental human condition from which action, and therefore stories and history as the outcome of action, originate. A central and notorious category within the Western philosophical tradition, mortality instead doesn’t serve at all the realm of action as Arendt intends it; actually, defined by her as “a second birth,” an active re-appearance in the human world, action contrasts precisely the disappearance from this world of which death consists. Yet as we read in the sentence quoted earlier, the event of death is deemed by Arendt necessary for the coming in to being of the essence of the departed, by now definitely consigned to his or her story. Death, essence, and narrative, in her argument, have a special link. Arendt purposely makes clear that the essence of who somebody is corresponds to “the unchangeable identity of the person,” and it ought not be confounded with “the human nature in general (which does not exist) or the sum total of qualities and shortcomings in the individual.”17 The key word in her logical construction is “unchangeability”: like in the case of the Greek daimon, there is something unique and distinctive in our personal identity—in our who-ness—that does not change and, notwithstanding the diverse circumstances and the unpredictability of events, keeps revealing itself in the flux of action. Death provides this unchangeable identity with a definitive permanent status or, in other words, an eventual completeness and unity which results in a definitive story.
Achilles and Odysseus
Interestingly enough, by continuing to call on the Homeric universe she strategically engages in order to test her concept of narrative, Arendt observes that Achilles and Odysseus enter this picture in meaningfully different ways. The exceptional case of a man “consciously aiming at being ‘essential,’ at leaving behind a story and an identity which will win ‘immortal fame,’” Achilles chooses a short life and a premature death because he knows that only he “who does not survive his supreme act remains the indisputable master of his identity.”18 In this sense, even if Achilles also remains dependent on the storyteller for his story to be recounted and saved from oblivion, he is the only hero “who delivers into the narrator’s hands the full significance of his deeds, so that it is as though he had not merely enacted the story of his life but at the same time also ‘made’ it.”19 Odysseus represents a different case, perhaps even more intriguing for delving into the Arendtian conception of narrative and trying to disentangle it from its bond with death. In her last work, The Life of the Mind, focusing on a famous episode of the Odyssey, Arendt reflects on the scene where Odysseus, during a dinner at the court of the Phaeacians, listens to a blind bard who recounts the war of Troy and tells Odysseus’s story. The hero weeps, Homer says. He had never wept before, Arendt notices, not while he was immersed in the actions narrated by the bard. Only now that Odysseus comes to hear his story and therefore know his identity as its protagonist, he feels a distinctive emotion and weeps. The unexpected discovery of who he is, received by Odysseus like a gift from the bard’s song crafting his identity in a tangible form, results for the hero in an emotional turmoil. His “tears of remembrance,”20 however, do not manifest in the hero’s melancholia or sadness for the time gone but rather spring from an experience of narrative disclosure that, according to Arendt, is upsettingly unusual: “What the storyteller narrates must necessarily be hidden from the actor himself, at least as long as he is in the act or caught in its consequences, because to him the meaningfulness of his act is not the story that follows,” she writes.21 Odysseus was not supposed to listen to his story and be confronted with the meaning of who he is. This is why his particular experience is extraordinary and relevant.
On a regular basis, in the epic universe of Homer, the heroes whom he sings of are already dead: they do not have the opportunity to listen to the narration of their own stories. Certainly, in this respect, Odysseus is a remarkable exception. Yet if we frame the same narrative setting within an ordinary scenario that escapes the grasp of ancient epic—a dislocation that Arendt seems to authorize when she claims that every individual life can eventually be told as a story and no heroic qualities are needed—this very exceptionality tends to fade. Namely, the occurrence of having our story, or parts of this story, told by friends, lovers, relatives, and other persons we are in touch with, is not an exceptional experience. Friendship, love, and family are ordinary narrative scenarios in which emotions come easily to the fore. From this perspective, Odysseus’s tears, although heroically remarkable, may hint at the very source of this common narrative experience. Perhaps, his emotional turmoil in receiving his own story directly from the mouth of the bard simply unveils his hidden but deep desire for having his story told. The unexpected discovery of who he is, received like a gift from the bard’s song, is, at the same time, the discovery of this very desire. As a matter of fact, the various heroes of the Trojan War did not have the opportunity of enjoying a significant experience such as this one. Put differently, they missed the chance of discovering their own narratable selves that, in the Odyssey, manifests itself through a strong emotion. In this light, we may conclude that, contrary to Achilles who counts on the link between narrative and death, the Odysseus “in tears” points to the more essential and, in Arendtian terms, structural link between narrative and birth. Arendt’s original conception of narrative suggests that “a story is a memory of an action that is itself a birth,” a plural interacting “whose ontological possibilities are established in the initial fact of our birth.”22 Narrative and action, therefore, remind us that we are beginners, and Odysseus’s tears are the immediate reaction to the force of this reminiscence. Pondering on “the birth of new man and new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born” in The Human Condition, Arendt calls it a miracle.23 Birth is the inauguration of a path not yet identified, the event of a pure possibility. Like a miracle, it breaks the regularity of nature’s cyclical movement and stresses the condition of human life as a unique life characterized by contingency and unpredictability. Action, the second birth, actualizes precisely these aspects of contingency and unpredictability and of narrative, as the outcome of action, and turns them into a story. This means that the story recounted by an other, as happens to Odysseus, confronts the narratable self with the tangible disclosure of his or her existential contingency—made up of deliberate choices and uncontrollable events, chances, incid ents, and blows of fortune—a contingency that, however, results in a meaningful personal identity or, at least, responds to the narratable self’s desire for a personal identity which has a meaning.
Arendt’s approach to the topic of narrative, far from engaging with literary or formal issues, focuses primarily on the ontological connection between human life and story:
The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is itself always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography.24
As Odysseus knew only too well, the meaningfulness provided by biography includes having a coherence among its narrative effects or, at least, addressing the desire of a self who longs for a coherent identity eventually displayed by one’s life story. Action and speech, the two political attributes through which human life manifests its specificity, Arendt claims, “are activities whose end result will always be a story with enough coherence to be told, no matter how accidental or haphazard the single events and their causation may appear to be.”25 Unsurprisingly, this is true not only for individual stories but also for history, the storybook of humankind. And even less surprisingly, the model on which Arendt constructs her conception of historiographical narrative is Homer together with Herodotus and Thucydides.
History
In her essay “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” Arendt remarks that “the modern concept of process pervading history and nature alike separates the modern age from the past more profoundly than any other single idea.”26 Basically, modern theorists conceive history as a process developing according to its own laws of motion and degrading individuals and their deeds into functions of its overall encompassing rational progress. “The central concept of Hegelian metaphysics is history,” Arendt argues, and “to think, with Hegel, that truth resides and reveals itself in the time-process itself is characteristic of all modern historical consciousness, however it expresses itself, in specifically Hegelian terms or not.”27 Development, progress, and continuity are the conceptual clues of this notion of history the narration of which, to say the least, is indebted to metaphysical rhetoric. The case is completely different with ancient historians, according to Arendt. Homer and Herodotus, far from considering the deeds and achievements of each human being as part of a wider and encompassing process, narrate history as a web of life stories rooted in contingency; far from singing of an epoch as the distinctive manifestation of the Spirit’s uninterrupted development, they sing of words and deeds and of events that occurred to human beings sharing the unpredictable outcome of their interacting; far from turning individual performances into unconscious instruments of the Zeitgeist, they maintain that “actions are meaningful regardless of their historical location.”28
“Impartiality, and with it all true historiography, came into the world when Homer decided to sing the deeds of the Trojans no less than those of the Achaeans,” Arendt writes; this impartiality, which “is still the highest type of objectivity we know,”29 rested upon the assumption that great deeds shine by themselves, no matter if performed by the winner or the defeated, and that in order to understand the facts they recount, historians ought to look upon the actual plurality of actors the human world consists of. All human deeds, in their mutual appearance within the public realm—be it in the polis or the Trojan war—deserve a narrative in order to become “the common heritage of which history is built.”30 Facts matter, and, confirming her realist vein, Arendt is convinced that historical narrative has to cope with “the solid objectivity of the given.”31 Contingency and unpredictability of human actions are part of this objectivity. Herodotus wanted to “say what it is” because narration stabilizes the futile and perishable, and it “fabricates a memory” for it and saves from oblivion the meaning that deeds and events carry within themselves: “the flux of his narrative is sufficiently loose to leave room for many stories, but there is nothing in this flux indicative that the general bestows meaning and significance on the particular.”32 Differently told, contrary to the modern conception of history that calls on the necessity of the process, ancient historiography allows human freedom to enter the narrative plot, even the plot that the historian’s posthumous gaze reframes into a meaningful coherence.
Although she was a political thinker and not a professional historian, Arendt engaged directly with history when she worked on her monumental book on The Origins of Totalitarianism and addressed the questions her generation was confronted with: “What happened? Why did it happen? How could it have happened?”33 For Arendt, writing about totalitarian regimes and the concentration camps, which she saw as the most unprecedented form of human domination, “presented profound historiographical dilemmas,” among them, as Arendt confesses, the dilemma of saving from oblivion something that she felt “engaged to destroy rather than conserve.”34 At the time, in the aftermath of a catastrophe that even challenged human imagination, she was primarily concerned with the modern version of the historical narrative’s preserving effect, that is, the fact that the narration of modern historians, by insisting on chronological sequence and the logic of precedence and succession within the continuity of the process, ends with producing a justification of whatever happened, no matter its ferocious and unprecedented novelty, in terms of necessity and inevitability. In The Origins o f Totalitarianism, Arendt fiercely opposes this kind of historiographical model, and she makes clear that “comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedence,” thus neutralizing the shocking impact of phenomena that exceeds our categories of understanding and of our power of imagination; comprehension rather “means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.”35 By endorsing this principle that contrasts any possible justification for what happened, in the book on totalitarianism, Arendt develops a profound and multilayered analysis of the distinctive aspects of total domination, constructing her investigation as a narrative that traces the complex constellation of historical movements—first and foremost anti-Semitism, colonialism, and imperialism—flowing into the twentieth-century invention of the totalitarian regime. Significantly enough, she inserts into her narrative biographical accounts of the protagonists of these movements, like Benjamin Disraeli and T. E. Lawrence, and she even resorts to fictional novels such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “the most illuminating work on actual race experience in Africa,”36 according to Arendt. As a matter of fact, to engage in biographical writing was not a new experience for Arendt: in her youth, she had worked on a book whose title, Rahel Varhagen: The Life of a Jewess, speaks for itself. Moreover, in the course of her life, she continued to be interested in biographies, producing insightful portraits of Karl Jaspers, Rosa Luxemburg, Pope John XXIII, Isak Dinesen, Bertolt Brecht, and others, collected in Men in Dark Times, not to mention the intense biographical accounts of G. E. Lessing and Walter Benjamin that can be found in her philosophical essays. Not only did Arendt believe in biography but she also maintained that certain lives are exemplary, and they are all the more so if their “heroes” live in dark times tragically contrasting the public light of Homer’s world. In the final analysis, Arendt’s Homer is precisely the screen on which she projects this contrast.
Narrative and the Shoah
Homer and the ancient Greeks in general are, for Arendt, a resourceful topos of the Western imaginary, the ground for rethinking the human condition within a political framework after the horror of Auschwitz injured its ontological dignity. This is true also for the issue of narrative and, even more so, for the constitutive link between stories and history that Arendt attributes to the Homeric poetics but which, in her thinking strategy, works especially as a response to the totalitarian will to eliminate life stories along with lives themselves. Arendt’s legacy helps us focus on the redemptive power of narrative in the presence of forms of extreme violence that outrage the human and challenge our capacity for conceptualizing evil. It is the very violence that targets the inmates of the Lager, whose existence, starting with the erasure of their name and personal data, was obliterated, so that their having lived in the world would neither become part of a story nor become a part of history. “The status of the inmates in the world of the living, where nobody is supposed to know if they are alive or dead, is such that it is as though they have never been born,” Arendt underlines; in totalitarian regimes “all places of detention ruled by the police are made to be veritable holes of oblivion into which people stumble by accident and without leaving behind them such ordinary traces of former existence as a body and a grave.”37 Plausibly, it is precisely this outrageous scenario, entrenched in the inexplicable violence of the present, that frame Arendt’s enthusiastic interest in ancient Greece and the Homeric universe of storytelling, a modality of narrating that aims at saving the meaning of unique lives from oblivion by preserving their memory among posterity. In this sense, Arendt belongs together with a variety of authors who, faced with the fact of the extermination camps, have been able to identify the crucial relationship between destruction and narration, between the dismantling of the human being perpetrated by the totalitarian machine and the saving power of life stories that restore the human status of uniqueness to the victims. The exemplary accounts by Primo Levi, Jean Améry, and David Rousset as well as the now immense biographical and autobiographical literature of the Shoah belong to the same problematic horizon that Arendt helps open up. As if Arendt, while seemingly speaking of Homer and of ancient heroes, already could see, on the one hand, the necessity of a new literary genre to narrate the lives lost in the horror of extermination and, on the other hand, the need to tell them so that the story book of humankind recovers meaning. Narrative, then, in Arendt’s poetics, is essentially a question of ontology and politics.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 184.
2 Ibid., 179.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 176.
5 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1966), 443.
6 Ibid., 454.
7 Arendt, Human Condition, 179–81.
8 Ibid., 181.
9 Ibid., 186.
10 Hannah Arendt, foreword to Isak Dinesen, Daguerreotypes and Other Essays (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), xx.
11 Arendt, Human Condition, 181.
12 Ibid., 186.
13 Ibid., 194.
14 On the issue of “narratable self” in light of Arendt’s conception of narrative see Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narrative: Storytelling and Selfhood (New York: Routledge, 2000).
15 Arendt, Human Condition, 186.
16 Ibid., 193.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 193.
19 Ibid., 194.
20 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1968), 45.
21 Arendt, Human Condition, 193.
22 Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: Life is a Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 25.
23 Arendt, Human Condition, 247.
24 Ibid., 97.
25 Ibid.
26 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 63.
27 Ibid., 68.
28 Ibid., 81.
29 Ibid., 51.
30 Olivia Guaraldo, Storylines: Politics, History and Narrative from an Arendtian Perspective (Sophi: Jyvaskyla, 2001), 47.
31 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 89.
32 Ibid., 64.
33 Arendt, Origins, xxiv.
34 See Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 87.
35 Arendt, Origins, viii.
36 Ibid., 185.
37 Ibid., 444, 434.