The Vast, Unfinished Plot: Excavating the Political Unconscious of Narrative Inquiry

In this chapter, a meta-analysis of narrative method, I examine how narrative inquiry embodies a strategy of containment by which the ideological structure of music and music education history is repressed by its confinement within a form, the narrative research product, constructed by historically available symbolic and structural categories. This containment leads to an ideological obfuscation of the lived contradictions brought forth by postmodern, late-capitalist society. Employing American literary critic, philosopher, and political theorist Fredric Jameson’s concept of the political unconscious, I demonstrate how the researcher’s unconscious libidinal investment in both the research topic and participants generates an unconscious authorial wish-fulfillment through a particular narrative construction. I argue for, following Jameson, the priority of the political interpretation of texts, as I consider the products of narrative inquiry as such texts. I analyze a narrative study in music education to exemplify these theoretical musings. I conclude by offering that a dialectical concept of narrative as allegory allows for a reconciliation with contradiction while connecting the local to the global, preserving the individual narrative.