The reason we can no longer tell stories can be put simply.
The end of a story, whether happy or tragic, must be the
resolution of the conflict. The murderer is caught, the couple united, the tragic
hero dead—and the world returns to normal.
This “normal” is indispensable. It is not a drab uniformity but a great solid continuity. It is the whole ongoing world, which contains these struggles, joys, disasters and survives them and continues on, with its ordinary doings, its births and deaths, its endless cycles. Every emperor goes to his grave, every empire falls, every sharp edge is worn smooth with time.
But now we feel that the world itself is bad, its future bleak, its cycles broken. So when the story ends, there is nothing to return to. The lovers are united, the falsely accused proven innocent—but what lies ahead for them? Life in a botched civilization.
*
Things are not so bad as we sometimes imagine them. The world is still the world. Armageddon is not here, however much we dream of it. But things have gone very wrong, and we have lost our faith—in ourselves and our way of life. And, without that faith, the basic structure of a story is lost. We don’t know what to hope for.
3 comments:
Totally.
Here's how I'm trying to think (for narrative purposes only of course)...
Civilization is the conflict. Its destruction is the resolution. The indispensable normal is the equilibrium of the universe beyond human civilization.
The "post-human" is a big thing in the academy these days. But I don't think my imagination is big enough to find resolution there. To me, without the human, there's nothing, or nothing that I can make any meaning out of. The point of a story, after all, is to make meaning.
The normal, ‘wholeness’ of the world is ground on which stories take place. It is this wholeness that the conflict at the heart of the story has disturbed, and the end only resolves things when the wholeness is restored. The restoration can be as dark as you like. Here, for example, is the very end of Moby-Dick (save the Epilogue):
"But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;—at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago."
The sea swallows entirely the sky-hawk, the Pequod and all its crew (save one), then rolls on over them as if they had never existed. That may not offer much comfort, but the tension that drove the story, Ahab’s obsession with the white whale, has been resolved, and equilibrium – the eternal sea – has been restored.
But what happens when the sea itself is heated to the point of deoxygenation, the fish die, and the water rises to flood the coastal ports from which the whaling ships once set sail? How can a world where the sea itself – much less nations and men – is thus altered find its way back to its original state? What does resolution look like there, i.e. here?
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