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Thursday, August 30, 2007

Narrative Drive


"In the confused, muddled velocities of my mind was an editorial sense that this was wrong, that this was an ill-judged element in the story of my life," writes Harold Brodkey in This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death, which chronicles his dying of AIDS. "I felt too conceited to have this death."

Written like a true writer. Writers, more than other people, impose plots on their lives and on the lives of others; they think in terms of stories always, and if they're very forceful stylists they can do this thinking in a way that, while sometimes hectoring, can also be very effective. Their narrative vision of a better world can enable powerful novels that have an actual impact on social reality; their representations of liberated minds can have a liberating effect on the minds reading them.

You can see the benign power of the imposition of narrative in another writer's chronicle of his last days. Contemplating his cancer, Anatole Broyard wrote, in Intoxicated By My Illness:

My initial experience of illness was as a series of disconnected shocks, and my first instinct was to try to bring it under control by turning it into a narrative. ... The patient has to start by treating his illness not as a disaster, an occasion for depression or panic, but as a narrative, a story. Stories are antibodies against illness and pain. ...Gregor Samsa dies like an insect. To die is to be no longer human, to be dehumanized - and I think that language, speech, stories, or narratives are the most effective ways to keep our humanity alive. ... [A] sick person can make a story, a narrative, out of his illness as a way of trying to detoxify it. ... Making narratives like this rescues me from the unknown, from what Ernest Becker called 'the panic inherent in creation,' or 'the suction of infinity.'


The Brodkey excerpt suggests the dark side of this intense narrative drive -- the same drive can be a species of arrogance, and can create enormous resistance within the writer him or herself to the largely uncontrollable event-clamor of everyone's life.




In the case of the recent much-discussed Arthur Miller revelations -- he had a child with Down Syndrome whom he institutionalized, neglected, and never mentioned -- the matter of putting away life elements that don't comport with a certain personal narrative is worsened by Miller's sense of moral superiority, as one observer notes in a New York Times article about the playwright:

Writers like Miller and Gunter Grass, “who set themselves up as moralists and public scolds, are more vulnerable to criticism based on their own behavior,” wrote Morris Dickstein, who teaches English at the City University of New York Graduate Center, in an e-mail message this week. “But the truth is that very few great artists were admirable people. At heart they’re killers who’ll do anything to get the work done.”


As the author of a lengthy Vanity Fair account of Miller and his son puts it, "A writer, used to being in control of narratives, Miller excised a central character who didn't fit the plot of his life as he wanted it to be."