Saturday, April 18, 2015

The Narrative of a Trip

I’ve been on my PhD program for about half a year now. During that time my research has turned toward a legacy of my upbringing. I grew up in newsrooms, learned the rudiments of good storytelling there. Later, I helped to teach them. Knowing what happened is only the beginning of reporting news. It’s also necessary to eviscerate why an event happened. Who was involved?  How did said event transpire? Over what geographical and temporal scope did an event occur? If you can’t organize these elements according to a crisis-conflict-resolution narrative format, you don’t have a story.
When your life revolves around academic thought it’s easy to forget ‘real life’ experiences that sponsored those insights. A recent family trip to Amsterdam, Antwerp and the D-day beaches of Normandy inspired me to reflect on narrative’s power. My research seeks to explain popular resistance to EU integration as resulting from negative framing of intra-EU migration in issue-narratives of national news medias.  Scholarly investigation can distance the researcher from the object which that person is studying. My trip brought to mind storytelling’s power to influence opinions. Its propensity to intensify interest.  
In Amsterdam, we stayed in an apartment less than a block away from the city’s West Church. The sizable structure was usually surrounded by the line for the attraction next door: The Ann Frank House. My mother informed me that we had pre-reserved appointments for entry to that attraction on the last day we were in Amsterdam. I’ve never read the famous diary. When compared with attractions such as the Rijks Museum, I expected it to be the low point of the Dutch part of our odyssey.
The Rijks Museum was the first attraction we visited. I was intrigued by the exhibitions. Our time in Amsterdam progressed. I noticed that other attractions enticed throngs of interested individuals who lined up en masse in order to gain entry.  One such experience took place at the Van Gogh Museum. My journalist mother solidified the allure of these attractions over others: “The Rijks Museum? That has some famous paintings.” She interpreted. “Van Gogh? That’s someone whose life people want to know more about”. Indeed, the Ann Frank House’s slogan reads “A museum with a story”.
I was impressed by my visit to the Ann Frank House much more than I expected. The exhibit enthralls the visitor in the narrative of a family’s struggle to survive. In so doing, it exemplifies one group of people as representative of a larger, more abstract, tragedy that occurred over seventy years ago. It puts a face to the story – a news format I learned from my mother years ago. In spite of (or perhaps because of) this knowledge the exhibit inspired me to reflect.
Where my ancestors departed Europe -
now a car park  
In Antwerp, I discovered some of my own forgotten history.  I barely remembered that my Slovene progenitors’ point of departure from Europe was the Belgian city's port until my mother reminded me. They left almost exactly a century before I moved to Europe and claimed my Slovenian passport. We spent most of an afternoon at the Red Star Line Museum.  While there, we confirmed the Anzur family’s passage on that line’s routes in the exhibit’s information section. Simultaneously, we fielded questions about our own story from other visitors. My mother (and I) took pride in saying that a century later I had come back to Europe. She’s thinking of writing a book about it – four generations of a Slovenian family.  After 100 years my family’s narrative had begun to resolve into a full circle.
In Normandy, I came face to face with a battle of ideas: a struggle to define the narrative of modern European history. I became interested in the EU while living in Europe. I’d always thought of the EU’s genesis and subsequent expansion eastward after the Cold War as the EU explains it: an initiative by European countries to drive their own future. The American exhibits at many of the D-day sights told a different side of the story. They maintained that European integration would not have been possible if it weren’t for American involvement in World War II. At first, I was somewhat bemused by this contention. Still, as I was subjected to this story frame again and again I began to see a certain appropriateness in it. Reflecting on this now, I should say that reality is probably somewhere in the middle. The US was needed to help win the war, but it was the Europeans who picked up the ball and ran with it afterwards. Telling multiple stories on the same issue can influence one to adopt certain stances on the broader issue to which they relate, or even create. I use this concept in my research. Yet, standing in front of those American exhibits I realized I was still susceptible to the narrative framing of issues.
The specter of war

Many times during my visit to Normandy my father remarked that a conflict on the scale of the Second World War could not occur today. I’m still not sure why he kept saying this. Still, as I watched clips of old news reels from both sides of the conflict, it dawned on me that he might be right. Taking place just before the dawn of mass media, WWII was one of the last conflicts where belligerent governments could almost completely define the story of the war to their own publics. In light of the more pronounced anti-war sentiment during conflicts later in the 20th century, I find it ironic that the framing of the Second World War persists even today, often regarded as somehow more righteous than subsequent campaigns. To what extent this is true I leave open for contemplation.
The power of narrative permeates our everyday lives. It’s a powerful motivator.  Whether it’s a single story, event or issue, it has the ability to influence us without our even realizing it. The above statement may make it sound insidious. When used for inherently devious ends, narrative can carry that danger. Yet, it’s that same power that imbues it with a primal argumentation – the simple charge of a good story. The need to tell, hear and sometimes believe in stories resides within all of us. Through the ritual of storytelling we seek to define our own journeys - and the ones of those around us - as best we can.

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