Learning, Curriculum and Life Politics: the selected works of Ivor F. Goodson
Representing Teachers
Let us try to situate the narrative moment in the historical moment – for the narrative movement itself could be located in a theory of context. In some ways the movement has analogies with the existential movement of the 1940s. Existentialists believed that only through our actions could we define ourselves. Our role, existentialists judged, was to invent ourselves as individuals, then, as in Sartre’s (1961) trilogy Les Chemins de la Liberté, we would be ‘free’, especially from the claims of society and the ‘others’.
Existentialism existed at a particular historical moment following the massive trauma of the Second World War, and in France, where it developed most strongly, of the protracted German occupation. George Melly judges that existentialism grew out of this historical context.
My retrospective explanation is that it provided a way of exorcising the collective guilt of the occupation, to reduce the betrayals, the collaboration, the blind eye, the unjustified compromise, to an acceptable level. We know now that the official post-war picture of France under the Nazis was a deliberate whitewash and that almost everyone knew it, and suppressed the knowledge. Existentialism, by insisting on the complete isolation of the individual as free to act, but free to do nothing else, as culpable or heroic but only within those limits, helped absolve the notion of corporate and national ignominy (Melly 1993, p. 9).
Above all, then, an individualizing existentialism freed people from the battle of ideologies, freed them from the awfulness of political and military conflict. Individualized existentialism provided a breathing space away from power and politics.
But the end of the Second World War did not provide an end to politics, only a move from hot war to cold war. As we know, ideologies continued their contest in the most potentially deadly manner. During this period, narratives of personal life began to blossom. Brightman (see Sage 1994) has developed a fascinating picture of how Mary McCarthy’s personal narratives grew out of the witch-hunting period of Joe McCarthy. Her narratives moved us from the ‘contagion of ideas’ to the personal ‘material world’. Mary McCarthy could ‘strip ideas of their abstract character and return them to the social world from whence they came’ (quoted in Sage 1994, p. 5).
In Irving Howes’s memorable phrase, as ‘ideology crumbled, personality bloomed’ (Sage 1994, p. 5).
And so with the end of ideology, the end of the cold war, we see the proliferate blooming of personality, not least in the movement towards personal narratives and stories. Once again, the personal narrative, the practical story, celebrates the end of the trauma of the cold war and the need for a human space away from politics, away from power. It is a thoroughly understandable nirvana, but it assumes that power and politics have somehow ended. It assumes, in that wishful phrase, ‘the end of history’.
