Peace and Conflict Studies - Spring 2014

Peace and Conflict Studies Volume 21, Number 1 5 Bruner (1991) notes, when discussing the different features of narratives, “There seems to be some sense in which narrative, rather than referring to ‘reality’, may in fact create or constitute it, as when ‘fiction’ creates a ‘world’ of its own” (Bruner, 1991, p. 13). For these and other reasons, as Jameson (1981) claims, it is a mistake to try to differentiate between cultural texts which have social political aspects and those who supposedly do not. Everything that is poetic is also political, and “…there is nothing that is not social and historical – indeed, that everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political” (Jameson, 1981, p. 20). Therefore, every cultural text should be looked at as a political text; and analyses of such texts should reveal the underlying assumptions, the unconscious political worlds, and the hidden ideologies that they are based on. As Dowling (1984) explains it, taking the Freudian interpretation of dreams as a reference, when a dream is dreamt the unconscious supposedly does not exist because the dreamer experiences it as a full independent story. Yet the unconscious actually dictates the dream. Likewise, cultural texts are supposedly autonomous, but they are actually constructed and based on ideologies, schools of thoughts, social perceptions and collective shared values. That is why genres change as times change (Bruner, 1991) and different nations at different times produce different kinds of narratives in their cultural texts. Fictional texts produced in societies in conflict have an important role in shaping the conflict and introducing it to the societies involved. It is even claimed that societies in intractable conflict actually share a culture of conflict in which “the socio-psychological infrastructure… is not only widely shared but also appears to be dominant in public discourse… (and) is expressed in cultural products such as literary books, TV programs, films, theatre…” (Bar-Tal, 2010, p. 191). Cultural products help the members of society cope with the stressful experience: they illuminate the conflict situation, justify problematic and violent acts toward the enemy, create a sense of differentiation and superiority, prepare society for difficult conditions, motivate solidarity and contribute to strengthening the social identity. Although fictional cultural texts are part of the building of the national narrative and of the culture of conflict, they suggest a different discourse by their mere definition: they are more ambiguous and more equivocal than the way societies supposedly think and act during conflicts. Fictional texts are not obligated to tell a mimetic story about reality; they do not have to be true or false and do not necessarily have any conclusion. On the contrary, what makes them interesting and unique is the fact that they have many layers, talk in different