The Conditions of Narrative (6 of 6)

The preceding discussion raises an obvious question: is it still possible to write characters and actions that have the solidity, the opacity, the grace that we have been discussing? If so, how? If not, why not?

The first point I want to make here is that the intent of this question need not be to reach back to some earlier form (epic, tragedy). It is a question about narrative in general, in fiction, in television, in film—and it is also a question about ourselves, our characters and our actions.

When I was finishing college and beginning to write in response to the world around me—when, that is, my writing ceased to consist merely of gestures at moods I aspired to and became in some sense an attempt to respond to realities—it immediately began to seem to me that the world I was coming of age into was one that did not contain stories.

This statement will either be perfectly familiar to my reader or else strike her as perfectly ridiculous; it is difficult to imagine an in-between. What I mean by it is that the people I knew and met around me (myself perhaps most of all) seemed incapable of taking the sorts of actions and making the sorts of gestures that could become the stuff of dramatic narrative. At the time, I might have explained this by saying that we were too prudent, too hesitating, too cautious; but however narrowly accurate this description may have been it was a superficial one. It is more revealing to say that we were too transparent to ourselves. We knew too much about ourselves. Or rather: we looked too closely at ourselves, and this gaze was not insightful, because it was clouded by powerful ideas about what we wanted to see and what we were afraid of seeing. But though it was not insightful, it was in some brute sense penetrating and left no room for the dark un-interrogated realms of the self from which dramatic action springs. It interrogated them out of existence.

(I am reminded of some comments by Adam Phillips from an interview in the Paris Review a couple of years ago: “What psychoanalysis, at its best, does is cure you of your self-knowledge. And of your wish to know yourself in that coherent, narrative way. You can only recover your appetite, and appetites, if you can allow yourself to be unknown to yourself. Because the point of knowing oneself is to contain one’s anxieties about appetite.”)

However peculiar this experience (of the absence of the conditions for dramatic action) may have been to a certain disposition and to a certain class milieu, what I have seen since has led me to believe that it or something similar has become quite wide-spread. I think this is one of the main reasons that all of the most popular narrative art of the past two decades— Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, etc.—is essentially escapist in nature, driven by fantastical narrative forces that come from outside the ordinary world. This is also why so much of these stories focus on children: because children, we imagine, are exempt from the self-consciousness that cripples the rest of us. And this is why so much of them are set in a (semi-mythic) past whose nostalgic appeal is inextricable from the sense that, back then, people were realer (men real men, women real women, etc.); or else in an imaginary future whose central premise is some hardship that, again, makes actions and people realer. Sometimes, within these imaginary worlds, we even find figures that stand for the vapidity of our own world. Thus, for example, in Hunger Games, the people of the capital display just the superficiality and frivolity and alienation from the world of life-and-death that Hunger Games is itself an escape from. In Harry Potter, the muggles go on tiredly with their vapid worries and prejudices, blind to the vivid magical drama on which their lives depend.

I rarely read contemporary literary fiction, but what I have read seems to be struggling with the same problem in different terms. Thus, in 10:04, for 250 pages, Ben Lerner displays his prodigious talent, but can create no story, can only take us through the obsessive, awkward puttering of his life, from which he seems always on the verge of extracting a narrative force, but that force never emerges. In The First Bad Man, on the other hand, Miranda July unfurls one dramatic event after another; at first, these are delightfully absurd, but the further the book goes, the more forced and desperate they seem, until it becomes clear that it has all been only for show, and the lurid drama of her book is only another way of trying to cope with the utter lack of drama of her world.

So the question “Can we still write characters and actions like these?” is in fact a question not merely about ourselves as writers or about the characters we write but about ourselves as characters. That is—and this is as it should be—the problems entailed in writing stories are inextricable from the problems entailed in living. If the conditions of the world change, then the conditions of narrative change.

But this suggests, in turn, that we cannot simply write our way of the problem; we must live our way out of it. But the verb live and the rhetoric it invokes in the phrases where I am using it, suggests an essentially personal project, whereas this is the opposite of what I want to suggest. If I am right that a development in how we look at ourselves, how we know ourselves, has made it difficult to tell stories that are about the world rather than escapes form it—then this development should not be understood as a purely private matter; it is a social development. To address it would require not merely a shift in our individual outlook but in our relations to others—the two, of course, are inextricably interwoven. I believe that this shift is in fact possible. More than that, I think it is one we must undertake.