or constituting the subject. Instead of acting within a world whose meaning has been forged by stories, one acts to make a story come true. The interest is in meaning-making as opposed to meaning “effects.” One good example of “acting for the story” comes from Curtis Jackson-Jacobs’s (2004) study of young men who start street fights, including ones they are unlikely to win. They thrill to the prospect of such violence. Jackson-Jacobs explains: “Fighters intend their brawls to make good stories that reveal themselves as charismatic. And so they enact storylines that they expect will both test their character and be applauded by audiences” (p. 232). Jackson-Jacobs refers to narrative “gratifications” and “payoffs,” especially the thrill of realizing “a storied self: a self that will become publicly and enduringly admired, immortalised in epic fight stories told for years to come” (p. 231). Jack Katz (1988) makes a similar point about enacting a rewarding story even when the action might be lethal. Katz observes, for example, that for murderers “the dramaturgic aspects of the fatal scenes were specifically appealing” (p. 300). He explains: “The key emotional dynamic on the path to these (‘senseless’) murders is a play with moral symbolics in which (1) the protagonist enters as a pariah, (2) soon becomes lost in the dizzying symbolics of deviance, and then (3) emerges to reverse the equation in a violent act of transcendence” (p. 290). As in Jackson-Jacobs’s research, violent action permits Katz’s actor to perform a preferred self-story and thereby to construct a sought-after identity—a desired character. Another broadly significant case of acting for the story has institutional agents (e.g., states, militias, and law enforcement) manipulating their practices in order to construct themselves as triumphant, fierce, and so forth. The conceptual shift here is to conceive of the institution as a character with a public image. Thus we find police officials instructing officers to make more arrests in order to present the agency as tough on (and effective against) crime, and state regimes implementing policy as political theater.
In both the micro- and macro-level identity-performative cases the agent’s cognition is sidelined. Narrative is less how we know the world than it is a vehicle for being known in the world. The acting-for-the-story perspective posits stories as resources for identity-constructing persons rather than as guides to action; hence it takes the desire to realize a particular story or identity to be foundational. We act for the sake of a story; we do not act based on stories.
The identity-performative perspective on narrative has obvious affinities with Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical theory of social action and the doing gender approach (Butler 1990; Messerschmidt 1997; C. West and Zimmerman 1987). It is compatible with cultural criminology, for which crime and other transgressions as well as “criminal justice” are creative processes of meaning-making (Ferrell et al. 2004). The emphasis throughout is on action or practice, which communicates but is not textual in the technical sense of that word. The contributions of this view include its foregrounding of identity, gender identity not least of all; its recognition that we are always sending messages about ourselves to ourselves and to other people; and its provocative formulation of social action as signifying in the first instance. Yet, my inquiry into narrative immersion and impact does not easily align itself with the identity-performative perspective. A culturally favored narrative is already solidly in place from this theoretical position; therefore, the precise workings of that narrative (and how they may change) are not specified. The particulars of narratives have no special relevance to the theory; it may not be possible even to discuss narrative impacts. Going forward, I am keen to unpack the seductions of narrative that inspire crime and other harm, rather than the “seductions of crime” (Katz 1988) as story-making. Here I want to reiterate that these approaches are not logically incompatible. Actions may be “planned to generate an already imagined story of those actions” (Frank 2010a, p. 132), and the story may shape how people, including those who conceived it, think and feel. Storytelling may be seen as both strategic and impactful, something we manipulate and something that manipulates us.
NARRATIVE TRUTH AND NARRATIVE IMPACT
The supposed falsehood of certain stories has, in my view, been a distraction to narrative inquiry within criminology (Presser 2016). It has been presumed that only “real” things cause crime. Hence, many analysts who collect and/or appreciate narrative data seek to verify the authenticity of what the narrator has reported. But narratives affect us whether or not they are “true.”4 Gerrig (1993) writes: “With respect to the cognitive activities of readers, the experience of narratives is largely unaffected by their announced correspondence with reality” (p. 102). Inaccuracies and even outright duplicity therefore should not prevent social researchers from taking stories seriously.
What do we mean by truth? A story is generally called true if it corresponds to some verified reality. False stories are said to be discordant with that reality: they advance untruths or omit essential facts. A general suspicion regarding the truthfulness of harm-doers’ stories prevails in part because stories are used to explain one’s actions—which include actions held to be unethical. Those held liable for their actions tell stories: the motivation exists to be dishonest in order to get out of trouble and/or to continue doing what they are doing. But stories, always retrospective, also point forward. They give shape to what one will do next. The productivity of stories, rather than their epistemological basis, is what narrativists in the social sciences are wont to expose.
That factual accuracy does not determine the power of narratives should be quite evident from recent world affairs. Consider Pizzagate, the “fake” but influential online news story of Hillary Clinton’s pedophile enterprise mentioned at the launch of this chapter. Consider too the more or less fanciful tales used to recruit child soldiers, incite genocides, gain spiritual followers, or outpace political competitors. Stories that cast doubt on anthropogenic climate change take liberties even with established facts, but the impact of those stories cannot be denied. Nor does the accuracy of my personal or mundane stories matter, such as the one I tell myself of someone cutting me off on the road or leaving the milk out overnight. However untrue, they make me angry in the event. The turbulent 2016 race for president of the United States made abundantly clear that supporters open themselves to the influence of even outlandish stories that they want to believe (see, e.g., Gabriel 2016; Kang and Goldman 2016). Rapid-fire proliferation of information through technological innovation may have primed people to prioritize believability over accuracy on the idea that truth is difficult to nail down. Yet, it has been noted for some time that, among other things, a story’s verisimilitude or believability rather than its actual truthfulness determines its impact (Bruner 1986; Busselle and Bilandzic 2008). Emotion scholars agree that it is “the impression of reality created in the subject” and not objective reality that evokes feeling (Tan 1996, p. 67).
I have been discussing examples of stories that recipients believe to be true. We are led to wonder, though: Are we affected by stories that we believe to be false? The question has special relevance in the face of seemingly cynical political leadership. Do leaders—does anyone—believe their own duplicitous accounts?
Research demonstrates that we are affected by stories we know to be fictional (Green and Brock 2000; Green, Garst, and Brock 2004; Oatley 1999; Strange and Leung 1999). Impacts of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin on nineteenth-century American society (Hanne 1994) and of Richard Wagner’s operas on Adolf Hitler (Gottschall 2012) are well documented.5 Experimental research demonstrates stories’ effect on readers’ attitudes whether or not the stories are designated as fact or fiction. Few would call fiction false, but neither is it true in the technical sense of reporting on the real-world experiences of real-world individuals.6 In fiction, “something is consciously and openly ‘feigned’” (Strange 2002, p. 265; emphasis in original).
Are we also affected by the false story that calls itself nonfiction—what Kermode (1967, p. 190) calls a myth as opposed to a fiction? The notion of true (or false) nonfiction stories is, in fact, far from straightforward. Accounts of experience in the real world are molded by the unreliable reconstruction of memory, the requirement of adapting to cultural templates and demands, a desire to make ourselves (story protagonists) look good, the requirement of tailoring
