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- I remember being very perplexed by this the first time I read it. Out of all the problems in the world, this guy had an issue with …. stories? But, now that I’m older and more dyspeptic, I can see what he’s talking about and share much of the same aversion and belief — the idea that, to harness its full potential, literature, actually, has to confidently free itself from the confines of stories.
- That school of thought is worthy of respect, of course, but I find it somehow lacking. Simply put, there is a great deal in life that doesn’t line up with the world as it is presented to us in stories. There is dead time, there is feeling lost, there is what I used to think of as the walking-aroundness of life, there are the cycles of sun-up, sun-down, of seasonal renewal, which have only a glancing resemblance to the beginning-middle-and-end of story structures. I felt this strongly in my own life when, very naively, as a teenager, I imagined that the books I read would give me some insight into how the world worked and then discovered in my 20s that that just didn’t really seem to be the case. There seemed to be whole swathes of existence — what it’s like to have a job, how money works, the meandering course of most relationships and friendships — that just somehow didn’t really register in even the very highly-regarded, ostensibly successful stories that I was coming across.
- There’s not much point in being on one side of the fence or the other. Of course I like stories — it’s like being against motherhood or something to oppose them. But there is a point in your life when you sort of get tired of stories. “The problem with you Americans is that you watch too many movies,” says the villain in Fargo’s third season and I think he’s basically right. Get into the story sensibility and you expect everything to artfully resolve itself (which of course it never does) and you look for the beginning, middle, and end of things (which don’t actually really exist). You also find yourself getting bored and restless when narratives — or life itself — don’t cohere in the way you’ve become accustomed to. Choose the non-story sensibility, and life becomes almost immediately richer and more complicated — anything can be interesting, anything can be rewarding, the only limits on expression and on wonder become your own anxiety, your own lack of imagination.