My dissertation examines the narrative construction of self in Finnish first-person supernatural encounter narratives. Modernity promotes the idea of a subject who is capable of self-regulation, self-surveillance, and self-control. Having supernatural experiences shows a lack of these capabilities. Nevertheless, we hear personal experience stories about people encountering beings such as angels, extraterrestrials, guardian spirits and ghosts. My work uses this contradiction as a starting point and asks how narrators attempt to organize their baffling experiences through narrative for themselves and others, how narrators attempt to normalize the supernatural, and how narrators recognize and combat the stigmas related to the supernatural?
My work follows the narrative turn in social sciences and humanities, and applies the social constructionist approach to narrative and self. This research is interdisciplinary by its nature and draws its theoretical sources from folklore studies, cultural studies, narrative studies and social psychology. Applying the method of theme writing, I placed an inquiry in Finnish newspapers in late 2003 and early 2004 and got around 470 responses. I apply descriptive statistics to show the common traits of the research material, and I do a detailed narrative analysis on a subset of nine narratives.
This study shows that the selection of narrative means that the narrators employ when talking about supernatural experiences is wide. They use comparisons, direct and embedded evaluations, overlays and detailed orientations; they call to witness, address the reader, use internal dialects to balance between the traditions of belief and disbelief; and their narrative voices fluctuate between close and distant.
The narrators construct rational, yet emotional, and social, yet independent selves. They present themselves as valuing knowledge, yet understanding its limits. They show they are able to differentiate between the ordinary realm and the supernatural realm. They describe their social attachments and dependencies, but they also defend their unique experiences even if the experiences set them apart from others. Even though the supernatural is stigmatized, it is valuable when it makes the experiencer feel special, chosen, or gifted. Narrators’ attempts to normalize the supernatural are twofold. First, narrators negotiate and/or deny the stigmas related to the supernatural, and second, they express emotions. Narrators know that supernatural experiences may be explained as hallucinations, illusions or dreams resulting from intoxication, or mental disorders. They either deny these issues or explain that they do not account for the supernatural event. Second, the narrators offer an entry to their inner realm through emotion discourse. They describe a wide range of emotions, from fear to peace and joy. In brief, narrators tell us they are normal human beings with human reactions and feelings.