@Against Narrativity

There are deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative.

I need to say more about the Episodic life, and since I find myself to be relatively Episodic, I’ll use myself as an example. I have a past, like any human being, and I know perfectly well that I have a past. I have a respectable amount of factual knowledge about it, and I also remember some of my past experiences ‘from the inside’, as philosophers say. And yet I have absolutely no sense of my life as a narrative with form, or indeed as a narrative without form. Absolutely none. Nor do I have any great or special interest in my past. Nor do I have a great deal of concern for my future.

Here my main puzzlement is about what it might be to ‘give an ethical character to [one’s] own life taken as a whole’ in some explicit way, and about why on earth, in the midst of the beauty of being, it should be thought to be important to do this. I think that those who think in this way are motivated by a sense of their own importance or significance that is absent in other human beings.

Many of them, connectedly, have religious commitments. They are wrapped up in forms of religious belief that are – like almost all religious belief – really all about self.

Alasdair MacIntyre is perhaps the founding figure in the modern Narrativity camp... ‘The unity of an individual life’, he says, ‘is the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life.'

I have a perfectly good grasp of myself as having a certain personality, but I’m completely uninterested in the answer to the question ‘What has GS made of his life?’, or ‘What have I made of my life?’. I’m living it, and this sort of thinking about it is no part of it. This does not mean that I am in any way irresponsible. It is just that what I care about, in so far as I care about myself and my life, is how I am now.

The aspiration to explicit Narrative self-articulation is natural for some – for some, perhaps, it may even be helpful but in others it is highly unnatural and ruinous. My guess is that it almost always does more harm than good – that the Narrative tendency to look for story or narrative coherence in one’s life is, in general, a gross hindrance to self-understanding: to a just, general, practically real sense, implicit or explicit, of one’s nature. It’s well known that telling and retelling one’s past leads to changes, smoothings, enhancements, shifts away from the facts ... The implication is plain: the more you recall, retell, narrate yourself, the further you risk moving away from accurate self-understanding, from the truth of your being.

(in the voice of a critic) I’m sorry, but you really have no idea of the force and reach of the psychological Narrativity thesis. You’re as Narrative as anyone else, and your narratives about yourself determine how you think of yourself even though they are not conscious.