31 NARRATIVE

Inke Arns

A narrative or story (Latin, narratio) is a reproduction of an event, real or imaginary, in oral or written form. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, “to tell,” which is derived from the adjective gnarus, meaning “knowing” or “skilled” (Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2007).

A minimal definition of narrative entails someone telling someone else about something that happened. Narrative can be organized in a number of thematic or formal categories, including nonfiction (such as biography, journalism, and historiography), the fictionalization of historical events (such as myth, legend, and historical fiction), and fiction proper (such as literature).

While narrative has long been considered a supposedly inferior form of cognition or knowledge transfer within the hierarchy of natural scientific models, it has recently undergone extensive rehabilitation. With the end of the “master narratives,” as described by Jean- Franςois Lyotard (1979), narration has increasingly become a leading category of cultural studies and is used in fields as diverse as history, the history of science, memory research, film studies, sociology, psychology, and law. In a very broad sense, narration can be understood as a fundamental means of accessing the world, as a narrative “way of worldmaking,” as Nelson Goodman puts it (1988, p. 7). However, there exists a break, rather than continuity, between life (or event) and thinking (or representation). American philosopher Louis Mink formulated this concept in a nutshell: “Stories are not lived but told. Life has no beginnings, middles, or ends” (Mink, 1970, pp. 557-558).

According to Aristotle’s Poetics, narratives are characterized first by the “assembling of events,” i.e., by establishing specific connections, and second by a genuine temporal structure, such that narratives can generally be understood as temporally structured representations of event sequences.

A previously heterogeneous temporal event is assembled into a coherent whole—a story. However, in narratives, not only events or actions, but disparate elements—actors, actions, objects, times, places—are linked together in a “synthesis of the heterogeneous” (Ricreur, [1983/1985] 1984/88) and condensed into specific plots or fables (Bal, 2009). The specific strength of narratives can thus be described as follows: it is only as a result of their concatenation that individual elements of the narrative assume meaning, and through which contingent events are transformed into history. In structuralist narratology, narrations address changes of state or situation. The content is usually referred to as story, while such a mode of presentation is referred to as discourse. Another term—later prominently anchored in the historiographic debate by Hayden White—is that of plot. This designates a preexisting basic motif of a story that goes beyond the mere (chronological or episodic) juxtaposition of actions or events, and which relates the events to each other or allows them to diverge. A plot is, then, the cause-and-effect relationship between events in a story. Introduced and illustrated by a succinct example, this distinction was made by the British writer E.M. Forster: “‘The king died and then the queen died' is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief' is a plot” (1962, p. 86).

Among theorists of history, Hayden White is certainly the best-known exponent of a nar- ratological approach. In his 1973 Metahistory, White claims that historians only have a certain number of modes of presentation available to tell a story. Here, he introduces the term “emplot- ment,” which refers to a specific attribution of meaning to the narrated past. Historians, faced with a chaos of facts, first arrange events in chronological order (a simple form of narrative), after which they assign a beginning, middle, and end to the story, thereby constructing a plot. According to White, there exist only four “archetypal” narrative patterns—romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire or irony.

For him, then, historical representations are ultimately based on a dramatization of historical events. White's narrative constructivism was criticized for his supposedly postmodern relativism: after all, he pointedly described historical narratives as “verbal fictions,” “whose content was invented as well as found” (White, 1978, p. 82).

The relation between historical and contemporary artistic reenactment and narrative is a complex one. A reenactment is not simply a story that is being (re-)told; rather, it is a narrative, or, rather, it consists of scenes of a narrative that are enacted by participants, making them “eyewitnesses” to an event that constructs or critically reflects on a specific (dominant) narrative. Affect plays a very important role here, since performative embodiment turns reenactment into something more than narrative. By participating in or by observing a reenactment, people can relate to the reenacted event in a more emotional and immediate way, i.e., by imagining themselves as agents in the historical context. However, in the two examples discussed here, reenactment possesses an even more intricate relationship to narrative: it actively constructs (or deconstructs) the plot of a dominant or official narrative, either by negating eyewitnesses' accounts, or by making eyewitnesses' accounts the basis for the plot of a counter-narrative (evidence). While The Storming of the Winter Palace (1920) could be called a form of “history from above” that helped the Soviet government create an official narrative of the revolution, The Battle of Orgreave (2001) deconstructed an official narrative put forth by the Thatcher government, and replaced it by “history painting from below” (Deller, 2000, p. 10).

On its website, under the keywords “storming of the Winter Palace,” the commercial photograph agency Getty Images offers eight historical photos. Despite disparities regarding their “creation date” (1 January 1917; 7 November 1917; 7 November 1920; 1 January 1950) and slightly different image details, they appear to show the same event: the storming of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the October Revolution in Petrograd in November 1917.

Yet what the photographs (and Getty Images) do not specify is there are no photographs of this historical event. Even if a photographer had been present, he or she would not have been able to take the pictures offered by Getty Images, for the event did not occur the way it has been conveyed by Soviet historiography. The seat of the Russian Provisional Government was not stormed by revolutionary masses but rather by a handful of Red Guards, who captured a group of ministers who had long since surrendered. Thus, the event we see in the photographs never took place in this form. In retrospect, the fact that there were no pictures of this event proved advantageous for Bolshevik propaganda, for, to paraphrase Hans Mommsen (1964), the eyewitness is the propagandist's greatest enemy. Instead, the “storming of the Winter Palace” was staged after the fact.

The photographs offered by Getty Images show a “reenactment,” or, rather, a “preenactment” of the storming of the Winter Palace that was performed in 1920 in Petrograd for the third anniversary of the October Revolution. The notion of“preenactment” or “theater therapy” was coined by Russian theater director Nikolai Evreinov (1920). It describes how reality can be healed by a kind of acting cure, i.e., how theater can substitute situations that people cannot experience in real life. The storming of the Winter Palace was part of a mass spectacle that involved the participation of approximately 10,000 extras and 100,000 spectators. It was coordinated by a collective of directors under the leadership of Nikolai Evreinov (1879—1953). However, if one understands reenactment to mean the recreation or re-staging of an historical event, then in this case it was only an “as-if” reenactment, and thus an “as-if” replay of history that never in fact took place this way. Whether Evreinov was aware of this cannot be discerned from his texts. At least in this way he had the opportunity—perhaps even the assignment—to “inflate a small event by means of theatre into a large historical event.

One could also say, he was supposed to create history in the first place” (Sasse, 2014, p. 82). Assigning to theater such a central role fit well with Evreinovs concept of theater; after all, he had already called for the “theatricalization of life” in the 1910s. Under his guidance, the unspectacular capture of the Winter Palace was turned into a mass spectacle. As Sylvia Sasse notes, history was thereby repaired, and the Soviet Union received its originary narrative (p. 83).

At the same time, the spectators—as many as 100,000, equivalent to one-quarter of Petrograd’s population at the time—were not merely spectators. Rather, they represented the revolutionary masses that were supposed to be directly infected by the event. Sasse writes:

With regard to the history of theatre, this idea of the political mobilization of the masses dovetailed with the discovery of the spectator as actor. Or conversely, as formulated for the young Soviet Union: the discovery of the spectator as actor in theatre (actually a pre-revolutionary theatre project) corresponded with the political demand for the mobilization of the masses in the future dictatorship of the proletariat.

(2014, p. 90)

Anatoly Lunacharsky, then the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, viewed the spectacle in historical terms of the festivals of the French Revolution, during which the masses were supposed to become self-aware. “In order to sense themselves,” Lunacharsky wrote, “the masses must reveal themselves externally; and this is possible only if—to use the words of Robespierre—they become a spectacle of themselves” (Lunacharsky, 1958, p. 193). Festivals such as this, according to film historian Richard Taylor, were supposed to “create a sense of identification between the audience and the event re-enacted through the spectacle itself and the act of collective memory that it both embodied and provoked” (Taylor, 2002). This “biggest mass spectacle of all times” was “not so much about recalling the past” (Clark, 1996, p.

122), but rather, as art theorist Steve Rushton has accurately noted, “about restructuring the past for the needs of a (contemporary) audience” (Rushton, 2005, p. 6). Considering how exactly Evreinov’s Storming of the Winter Palace affected participants in the 1917 event and eyewitnesses of the 1920 reenactment, it can be said that for those who attended the original (non-)event, the reenactment “repaired” or “corrected” reality. In this case, the goal of the reenactment was to overwrite individual memory with an official version of history. For those who had not been present at the original event, the reenactment allowed them to experience the “event” directly. Propagandistic reenactments like the Storming of the Winter Palace were, in other words, deliberately used to facilitate identification with ideological goals. The plot of the newly created revolutionary narrative went like this: It was the masses, or the majority (“bolsheviki”) of the population, and not just a radical splinter group, that stormed the seat of the much-hated Provisional Government. The October Revolution acquired its foundation myth.

Whereas Evreinov with his Storming of the Winter Palace produces a spectacular picture of an entirely unspectacular event, contemporary artistic reenactments address precisely this mediat- edness of collective memory (mediality). As Steve Rushton argues, reenactments involve a

complex and in-depth reflection of the mediation of memory—which can be even described as the core subject of re-enactment as an art form. This tendency asks how memory is an entity which is continuously being restructured—not only by filmmakers and re-enactors but also by us personally, as mediating and mediated subjects.

(2005, p. 10)

The starting point for Jeremy Deller's The Battle of Orgreave was an official narrative situated not in Soviet but rather in English history. Triggered by the imminent closing of the mines, the 1984—1985 conflict between the conservative Thatcher government and the striking National Union of Mineworkers was the fiercest of its kind. In the mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher was intent on breaking the power of the unions at any price, with the dispute peaking on 18 June 1984 in a violent confrontation near the coking plant in Orgreave, SouthYorkshire. Horsemounted police units drove the protesting miners apart. Yet by altering the editing sequence of television reports (as directed by the political authorities), the events could be represented as “riots.” Against its better knowledge, the BBC announced that striking miners had initiated the violence, which justified the use of horse-mounted police units. Thatcher subsequently designated the striking workers and their unions “the enemy within,” heralding the end of the last great miner's strike in Great Britain.

With the support of Artangel, a London agency for art in the public sphere, Jeremy Deller returned to the site of the trauma 17 years after the original event. After several years of searching for information and conducting research, and with the support of more than 20 historical battle reenactment societies and the involvement of miners and police who had participated at the time, he arranged a reenactment of the “battle” of Orgreave on 17 June 2001. Deller characterized the event as “digging up a corpse and giving it a proper post-mortem, or as a thousandperson crime re-enactment” (2001).

In 1984, British media reporting on the miner's strike had been loyal to the government: the miners and their unions were not only accused of disorderly conduct vis-a-vis the police, but their strike was also blamed for paralyzing the British economy. Thus, for reconstructing the battle, Deller did not draw on reporting from the time, that is, on “the copious quantities of biased and misinformed newspaper articles that initially reported the story” (Blackson, 2007, p. 32). Instead, he relied on the personal memories of the former protagonists—both miners and police—as the basis for the reenactment. “By allowing personal memory to direct the course of the reenactment..., Deller's work The Battle of Orgreave [was] effectively righting old wrongs,” wrote the critic and curator Robert Blackson (2007, p. 32), not without pathos.

Along with the live reenactment on 17 June 2001, the project materialized in the following formats. Mike Figgis filmed a documentary movie for Channel 4 (The Battle of Orgreave, 2001, 61 Min.), which combined film footage from the 2001 reenactment with photographs from the confrontation in 1984 and interviews with participants, some of whom were speaking for the first time about the incidents. In addition, a publication appeared that documented the miners' strike in the form of an oral history (The English Civil War Part II: Personal Accounts of the 1984—85 Miner's Strike, 2002), and an archive was created, which the artist makes available in exhibits (The Battle of Orgreave Archive: An Injury to One is an Injury to All, 2004).

According to Robert Blackson, specific to Deller's project was the emancipatory role that the reenactment played in the northern England village communities that had been involved in the events. The reenactment, Blackson argues, corrected a (false) picture created by the media. Claire Bishop, however, questions whether the project had quite such a therapeutic function. By reviving the traumatic experiences of the 1980s, she feels that it did more to open old wounds for the miners (occupying, in part, the adversarial role of the police) than it healed (2012, p. 32). The reenactment brought “middle class battle reenactors” into direct contact with “working class miners.” This was very important, Bishop insists, because many members of the historical reenactment associations were actually afraid of the miners. Evidently, they believed everything they had read in the newspapers in the 1980s, now imagining that the men they were supposed to work with were either violent hooligans or staunch revolutionaries. Jeremy Deller also made use of something else for his performance, namely, the fact that the reenactment societies usually stage scenes from English history from the distant past and thereby create a safe distance from the politics of the present. By involving these groups, the events at Orgreave were symbolically incorporated into English history. The Battle of Orgreave thus generated new and different practices for historicizing recent and still sensitive events that even today remain relevant to Britain's ongoing political and social conflicts. Moreover, by “allowing the miners' memories to control the course of the reenactment, the performance provided languishing mining communities with a way for their actions to act outside of the historical script that was determined for them by the government and media. Thus, the artwork ‘became a part of [the strike's] own history, an epilogue to the experience'” (Blackson, 2007, p. 33).

Historical narratives are invented, or constructed retrospectively, post ipso facto. Not only do they assemble previously unconnected events, but they also link these events in a chronological way by creating plots—i.e., by making these events relate to each other and turning them into a coherent story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes, these stories attain hegemonic power of interpretation, and then become “master narratives.” Both examples analyzed here either actively participate in the construction of such a “master narrative” (The Storming of the Winter Palace, 1920) or critically address the existence of a “master narrative” and replace it with a new narrative based on eyewitnesses' accounts that had previously gone unheard (The Battle of Orgreave, 2001). The Storming of the Winter Palace “blows up” an unspectacular event (a clandestine putsch against the political enemy) to a people's storming supposedly involving “the majority.” It thus “corrects” history by subsequently inserting the photograph of the theatrical event into history books and historical archives, where it passes as depicting the authentic event of the October Revolution. On the other hand, The Battle of Orgreave attacks and intends to erase the official narrative or plot (which resulted from a changed chronological sequence of events) by letting the miners' memories direct the reenactment and leading to a reversing of the sequence of events. This allowed for a correction of the hegemonic master narrative.

Contemporary artistic reenactments are—through their use of performative embodiment— powerful tools for directing the audience's attention to the constructedness of historical narrative (production of historical meaning). However, in order to achieve this, reenactment itself has to rely on the form of the narrative, which at the same time could be seen as a constraint.

31 NARRATIVE

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