Narrative Collapse?

Narrativity
is collapsing, Douglas Rushkoff excitedly reports in his 2012 book Present Shock. We no longer tell traditional stories because we no
longer live within ancient Aristotelian narratives with their beginnings,
middles, and ends.

Technology
killed narrative, leaving us in an eternal now. We don’t have to watch entire
TV shows anymore or tolerate thirty-second commercials. We click away in the
middle of things and never return. Without the time and patience to wait for a
plot to unfold, we live in a picaresque novel: one damn thing after another in
a world that “just is.” We’ve been thrown into a game to puzzle out rules we
don’t understand. We’re all baffled stowaways on the
Lost island.

It’s
OK, though. We can be weaned from our desire to organize time. We don’t need
narrative. In fact, Rushkoff soothes, we’re better off without it. Narrative is
nefarious. What Rushkoff dislikes about narratives are not the beginnings and
middles so much as the ends. As he told Ken Myers in a recent
Mars Hill Audio
Journal interview, eliminating ends will enhance human freedom. As soon as
we think we’re in a story, someone will say he knows where it’s going. Storytellers
believe their fantasy ending justifies any means they can imagine, and the
corpses pile up. Armed with our remote control, we won’t let them fool us anymore.
Set free from narrative, we are free indeed.

Technology
does affect our sense of time and the plottedness of the world, but the way Rushkoff
makes this point is unpersuasive. For a writer who makes his living tracking trends,
Rushkoff is out of date. Novelists began their experiments with plotting long
before
Ulysses (can you say Tristram
Shandy?). Filmmakers experiment too,
but still today there are dozens of
Avengers for
every
Being
John Malkovich.

Rushkoff
is similarly old-fashioned when he turns to television. We use remotes, but cutting
edge they ain’t. What
is cutting
edge is technology that allows some people (no one
I
know) to become binge viewers who watch an entire series on Netflix or Hulu in
a big lump of commercial-free wasted time. They don’t have to flip channels, because
they don’t get interrupted, and what they waste their time on are complex, sophisticated
narratives that arc across a half-dozen seasons. We still have our cop and
detective shows that miraculously and comfortingly resolve mysteries within
their allotted forty minutes. Sitcoms are more knowing about their tropes these
days, but they still repeat them, resolving their slight conflicts in half the
time. When we get entertainment on demand, many of us demand stories of a
pretty traditional sort.

Rushkoff’s
characterization of “Aristotelian” narrative is another false note. His worry that
endings inhibit freedom applies to Marxism, Nazism, and the myth of democratic
capitalism’s relentless conquest of the planet. But he’s not talking only about
these metanarratives. He thinks Western literature is a compendium of confining
conclusions.

What
tidy, tyrannical narratives does he have in mind? The
Iliad, whose final lines about Hector’s funeral games are
haunted by the realization that Greeks and Trojans will soon return to
fighting? Even the neater
Odyssey
implies a “to be continued,” Odysseus’s future quest to pacify Poseidon. The Aeneid concludes on a classic “now you know the rest of the
story” note, with the founding of the Roman
imperium sine fine, empire without end.

The
Bible begins at the beginning and ends at
the end, but, like the Aeneid’s, its
end is paradoxically endless. In John’s last vision in Revelation, nations are
still bustling into the city and the Spirit and the Bride are pleading, “Come,
Lord Jesus.” The Bible concludes with heaven and earth poised for an end that
is not yet come.

You
can’t get much more decisive than the end of
Othello—three principal characters dead on a bed and Iago
bundled off for torture—but the commentary on the play demonstrates that
Othello is anything but tidy. Lear’s ending is more poetically just than its absurdist interpreters admit,
but it leaves a loose end or two. Jane Austen wraps her books with a wedding
bow, but Austen’s readers keep writing sequels to tell what happened after the wedding.

Aristotle
might not like it, but it’s hard to think of a single great Western narrative
that doesn’t strain past its end. When the credits roll, we don’t sit in stupefied
silence, satisfied that all questions are answered. We want to know what the
end means, or to know what goes on after the end. We keep talking and telling,
questioning and musing and explaining. That’s what makes great narratives
great: Their endings provoke continuation. If that’s narrative collapse,
narrative began to collapse nearly as soon as it was invented. And Rushkoff is
outdated once again, not by decades but by millennia.

Peter J. Leithart is president of Trinity House. He is the author most recently of Gratitude: An Intellectual History. His previous articles can be found here.

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