When Reality Needs a Better Script

I am restarting the blog.

Perhaps “restarting” is too dramatic a word. Blogs, unlike people, have the considerable advantage of being able to disappear for a while without having to explain where they have been. However, in this return, I want to return to something that has driven much of my research for years—the story, or, if one wishes to sound appropriately academic, the narrative. Recent events have again reminded me that the more I look at everyday life, the more fascinated I become by the desperation of storytellers. We all tell stories. Sometimes we tell them to entertain. Sometimes to persuade. Sometimes to explain. And sometimes we tell stories because there is simply nothing else left to do. Reality, unfortunately, has never shown much interest in being coherent. Things happen without appropriate beginnings, satisfying endings, identifiable villains, or even competent scriptwriters. Yet we are expected to wake up the next morning and somehow continue living inside this badly edited production. So we tell ourselves a story. There may be a shred of reality somewhere inside it. Usually there is. But around that shred we carefully construct explanations, motives, intentions, causes and consequences until what actually happened becomes something that can be lived with. The embellishment is not necessarily decoration. Sometimes it is narrative engineering. Scholars have long suggested that narratives give meaning to existence. That sounds wonderfully profound until one considers where the search for meaning can take us. The desperate storyteller can eventually construct a story that nobody except the storyteller could possibly believe. In fiction, of course, we applaud this. There are no Hobbits. There are no Jedi. Yet put one in the Shire and the other on Tatooine and suddenly disbelief becomes a personal failing of the audience. Tolkien and Lucas are celebrated precisely because they created worlds in which the impossible becomes perfectly reasonable. Everyday storytellers face a more difficult problem. They cannot conveniently relocate their stories to Middle-earth or a galaxy far, far away. Their characters have real names, real histories and inconveniently real memories. Nevertheless, the need to make sense of lived experience can produce narratives every bit as fictional as Tolkien or Lucas—only without the benefit of elves, lightsabers or royalties. I have been thinking about this particularly after a recent incident that I described in a post on a digital-network platform. A number of people have suggested that I should take legal action. Perhaps they are right. It may indeed be the sensible, worldly and strategically intelligent thing to do. But legal action would require something more than lawyers and documents. It would require a story. I would have to construct a narrative about what happened, why it happened, who was responsible, what damage was done and what consequence should follow. And, inevitably, it would become a story designed to hurt someone else. Perhaps that is how the world works. Perhaps sometimes it is even how the world must work. But I find myself unable to construct that particular story. Not because I necessarily believe another person's version of events. Not because I have suddenly developed an objection to narratives—I have spent far too many years studying them to claim that innocence. And certainly not because I believe that refusing retaliation is particularly clever. It is simply because, after the lawyers have gone home, the documents have been filed, the arguments have ended and everyone has successfully established their preferred version of reality, I would still have to live with one storyteller. Myself. And I am not sure I could live with the story I would have had to tell. It is what Nico said in his song, “I won't do too much scheming these days.”