Externalising all the way: an obscure intervention
‘Externalising’ is a narrative process, drawn from narrative therapy and narrative mediation, in which you talk about a conflict or a problem as if it was a separate, 'external’ character – not something that exists within the disputants, but something with agency that operates between them. It’s a practical application of the theoretical position of antiessentialism - the idea that humans do not have essential selves but exist in a web of stories.
Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel Jude the Obscure tells the story of Jude Fawley, a young working class boy who dreams of becoming a scholar, and later falls in love with his cousin Sue Bridehead, having married in haste as a young man and becoming estranged from his wife. Both Sue and Jude are marked by a certain outsiderish quality from the beginning, and their sense of being misfit for the world is part of the force that draws them together. Read through narrative spectacles, the novel can be understood as a tragic litany of missed opportunities for externalised conversations. Sue and Jude, each in their own way, struggle against convention and the institutions of the day - the entrapment of marriage and the bonds of religion. n their fight for emancipation from them, they find themselves internalising the most egregious mores of both. The tragedy of the novel pivots on a conversation that Sue has with ‘Little Father Time’ (so nicknamed on account of his melancholy character) - Jude’s estranged son from his ill-fated marriage to another woman, who the couple have taken in. Towards the end of the novel, Jude, Sue, Little Father Time, and Jude and Sue’s two other small children find themselves in Christminster, searching for lodgings. Their unconventional family set-up has forced them into a nomadic lifestyle, moving from job to job and town to town, before the prejudices of their fellow citizens force them to move on. After a long afternoon of searching and rebuffs, they find a landlady who agrees to take in Sue and the children, and Jude is forced to go and find lodgings elsewhere. Upon further interrogation from the landlady, Sue, having ‘not the art of prevarication’, spells out her situation and is promptly asked to leave the house the following morning. Having put the smaller children to bed, Sue and Little Father Time set out on a final evening search, but without Jude with her, she fares even worse that she had with him, and the two return to their temporary home dejected and depressed:
The failure to find another lodging, and the lack of room in this house for his father, had made a deep impression on the boy—a brooding undemonstrative horror seemed to have seized him. The silence was broken by his saying: "Mother, what shall we do to-morrow!"
"I don't know!" said Sue despondently. "I am afraid this will trouble your father."
"I wish Father was quite well, and there had been room for him! Then it wouldn't matter so much! Poor Father!" […]
"Father went away to give us children room, didn't he?"
"Partly."
"It would be better to be out o' the world than in it, wouldn't it?"
"It would almost, dear."
"'Tis because of us children, too, isn't it, that you can't get a good lodging?"
"Well—people do object to children sometimes."
"Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?"
"Oh—because it is a law of nature."
"But we don't ask to be born?"
"No indeed."
"And what makes it worse with me is that you are not my real mother, and you needn't have had me unless you liked. I oughtn't to have come to 'ee—that's the real truth! I troubled 'em in Australia, and I trouble folk here. I wish I hadn't been born!"
"You couldn't help it, my dear."
"I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!"
Sue did not reply. She was doubtfully pondering how to treat this too reflective child.
She at last concluded that, so far as circumstances permitted, she would be honest and candid with one who entered into her difficulties like an aged friend.
There follows a further to and fro in which Sue’s fated decision to treat the child ‘like an aged friend’ leads her to confess to him that another child is on its way. This unexpected news throws the boy into paroxysms of rage, only too aware that his father and step-mother are struggling to feed the mouths they are already responsible for, without adding another one into the mix.
We can imagine that the conversation between Sue and Little Father Time had played out differently. Imagine if Sue had spent the previous years studying narrative mediation with Winslade and Monk, instead of at an oppressive teacher training college in nineteenth century Melchester.
"It would be better to be out o' the world than in it, wouldn't it?"
"Let us take this situation and give it a name, dear. What about the “accommodation problem?”"
"'Tis because of us children, isn't it, that you can't get a good lodging? What about the ‘too many problem?’"
"Well—people entertain some senseless notions, and our little family is quite different from what the landlady may be used to. How has the ‘too many problem’ made you think and feel in relation to yourself, your home and your family?"
"I can’t help but wonder, if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em? We don’t ask to be born, and I want nothing less that to be a burden on you, or on father."
"So it’s important to you to that your presence doesn’t cause difficulties for other people. Are there any other effects the problem is having on you or other people?"
"Well, I’m afraid that because you are not my real mother, you needn't have had me unless you liked. And sometimes, being illegitimate makes me wish I hadn't been born!"
"So this problem is causing you a lot of worry, and it sounds like you are also worrying about how your father and I feel towards you. If nothing changes and the problem persists, where will all this worrying lead?"
"Sometimes the problem gets me thinking terrible things, like whenever children are born that are not wanted they should be killed and not allowed to grow big and walk about! When the worry gets bad, I imagine doing something awful to relieve the burden on you and father."
“So the problem has the potential to do untold damage to you, your brother and sister, and to your father and I if we allow it to continue to fester inside you. In the best case scenario, how do you think us having this conversation might affect those thoughts and feelings that you have described?”
This is a fiction about a fiction, of course. Sue is the child’s stepmother, and not his therapist, and so she might have done well to simply reassure him that he was loved and wanted, rather than bamboozling him with a strange and anachronistic new language.. However, this Hardy-Winslade-Monk mashup may demonstrates how the process of examining - as external to us - the narratives of our self-understanding, and our relationships, can be widely applied to ordinary conversation. First, it includes the repeated call to action, to the recognition of the freedom we do have, and a bid for agency. Second, it is a collaborative and questioning process, which makes meaning socially - treating the problem as existing socially - and in and through contested relationships. We can examine ourselves and talk from an externalised perspective - even giving problems names (‘the communication problem’, ‘the self-esteem problem’, ‘the too many problem’) and attributing action to these external ‘problem-stories’, as characters in the wider story. This is a process to help us resist our essentialising habits and optimistically open up the possibility for new stories to be imagined and acted into.
In the time that has passed since Hardy created the world of Sue and Jude, the prejudices and presumptions of Victorian England on ‘the Marriage Question’ have come to seem self-evidently cruel and monstrous. We implicitly externalise what Little Father Time so tragically internalised - questions of material wealth, of restrictions on love, of the politics of the university, of the possibilities of gender - we recognise that they are all social questions. Jude the Obscure is a parable of the dynamic between the social and the personal, the ‘outer’ expectation, shame, and censure, and the ‘inner’ feeling and prompting, longing and suffering. The passage of time makes externalising easy. We read from another time, another culture. The storytelling patterns are more plain to us, than they are when we are living within them
