About Distances: Researching Emotional Lives

Abstract

Arthur Miller, near the end of his life, wrote that he felt more drawn to writing stories than plays. Reading stories as a boy, he wanted to skip to the dialogue, to where, as he saw it, the author stopped getting in the way and the action began. As he got older, he became more interested in the things which ‘register and weigh’ (Miller, 2010, p.viii) — place, objects, memories, the mood of the moment, dimensions he felt he could best capture through stories. Storywriting, he concluded, allowed him to catch ‘wonder by surprise’ (p.ix). His argument, ultimately, was not one about authenticity. Stories do not bring us closer to the truth, there is no end to masks: ‘the one we put down only leaves the one we have on’ (Miller, 2010, p.x). Rather, his point is one that sociologists have long grappled with: the way that different methods or representations render particular stories at different distances.

The title of the foreword in Miller (2010).