Without stories, we're lost

on storytelling, Joan Didion & postmodernism

A Bar, Brooklyn: Choose Your Own Adventure Narrative

From now on, audio recordings will be a standard feature on this space.

Big thanks to my readers for helping me find my voice the past two years.

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Joan Didion begins her essay “The White Album” (1968-1978)¹ with the following words:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

I’d like to offer an amendment addition:

We tell ourselves stories to prove we once lived.

We tell ourselves stories to remember we are alive.

I’ve been in the USA for the past four weeks, and each time I come here, I’m always surprised by the culture weight of nostalgia. Being here reminds me of visiting my Spanish family in Madrid, conservative traditionalist elders who almost exclusively want to talk about how things used to be. In the USA, nostalgia has been commodified to an extreme: there are TV commercials for anti-depressants that promise to “get you back to where you were,” it’s once again cool to dress like we’re in the nineties, and popular radio stations and ubiquitous sports bars are still playing music from the early 2000s (no shade against Outkast, Katy Perry, or the Black Eyed Peas, but are we truly okay with letting “Let’s Get Retarded It Started” play in the background of all our public experiences?

A Postmodern Disquiet

We want order and explanations.

We want to believe in cause and effect.

The most commonly accepted narratives aren’t those that represent truth. When we look to the past (especially when the current moment is so uncertain), we gaze back not to try and understand it but to coopt the past to provide meaning to our current epoch.  

It's impossible to pinpoint the exact beginning of a zeitgeist as vast and abstract as postmodern literature. Its predecessor, literary modernism, was largely a response to the brutal realities of World War One, an attempt to make sense of the insensible modern warfare. The modernists sought to deconstruct the specific grand narratives of religion, empire, and Enlightenment-era optimism, deconstructing old narratives in hopes of applying new “isms” to define the modern world. Expressionism sought to explain the world through myriad subjectivities. Cubists looked at ideas and objects from multiple perspectives. Futurism looked towards modern technology to imbue the future with clear and present meaning. At the same time, surrealism, borne from Andre Breton’s experience in battlefield psychiatric wards (“I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane”), shined a light on the subconscious and challenged humanity’s preconceived notions about reality: “a revolution in the minds of men in which dreams and reality would fuse in a kind of absolute reality—surreality.”

Common to all of these modernist philosophies, however, remained the conviction that a singular “ism” could explain existence via a clearly defined narrative. While the First World War forced writers to make sense of the beauty and barbarity of modernity, the crucibles of Hiroshima and Auschwitz obliterated any notion that the world (let alone human nature) could be explained through any kind of “ism.” In a word, post-modernism was a “post-ism,” a worldview that asked whether it was useful, let alone possible, to give clearly defined meaning to the impenetrable nature of existence.

In Samuel Beckett’s words, “The keyword in my plays is perhaps.” Other existentialists like Albert Camus suggested the only way forward was via the Absurd, a self-conscious acknowledgment that any attempt to view the world through an “ism” logically ends in absurdity. While the Gertrude Steins and Ernest Hemingways of the world attempted to replace the old grand narratives with new and improved lenses, the postmodernists suggested that the very idea of being able to see the world, let alone through a specific lens, was a hopeless, futile task.

Existence Defies Narrative  

Alas, the modernist narratives of progress, ethno-nation-states, and “good versus evil” only further eroded during the Cold War, even if the United States of America emerged from World War Two with its good-guy meta-narrative intact.

Here’s a common justification for mass murder civilian bombing campaigns like those in Germany and Japan (including two atomic bombs): they were actually a good thing because they prevented future hypothetical deaths. This remains American Exceptionalism at its most sanctimonious grotesque, which was soon repeated during the Korean War (1950-1953) Forgotten War, wherein at least two million civilians died for an invisible line called the 38^th parallel.

Communism, the supposed antidote to American cynicism capitalism imperialism, was simply the other side of an ideological coin, leading to generations of despotic oligarchs in Eastern Europe and Asia and tens of millions of deaths in the name of a supposed global community. Indeed, the Cold War only further revealed the tendency for politicians, historians, and average citizens alike to fabricate self-serving narratives mythologies to confirm our selective reading of history (not to be outdone by binary thinking, as the two supposed world ideologies jostled for position in the 1960s, in the Middle East a radical form of religious bigotry Islamic fundamentalism offered hundreds of millions an alternative to hedonistic colonialism).

For a brief moment in the late 1960s (or so we’ve been told in the USA), the Civil Rights Movement and the Flower Power Generation offered the possibility of a “free and just world” if only we could give peace a chance. Despite its virtuous bedrock, however, this was yet another example of a categorical belief in a particular kind of “ism,” perhaps best debunked by Joan Didion’s essay in which she reveals how the most promising well-oiled narratives of freedom, democracy, benevolent imperialism, and free love were beaten down in the streets of Chicago and Montgomery, Alabama, firebombed in the forests of Vietnam, and hacked to pieces by psychotic hippies in Beverly Hills:  

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.

Those words were written in the 1970s. Fifty years onwards, is it really any different? At the end of “The White Album,” Joan Didion isn’t any closer to finding meaning than when she began. “In other words,” she concludes, “It was another story without a narrative.”

I’m not quite sure what to make of all of this just yet. Such is the postmodern dilemma (I neither have the energy nor conviction at the moment to promote my favorite “ism,” Metamodernism). I’ll be leaving the USA in a few days to return to Paris, and while I hope to tell a few stories about make some sense of my last few weeks here, as a storyteller, I must admit: I have yet to find meaning a cohesive narrative to my solo week in New York City, my calming days with my wife and family on the northeast coast, and my challenging edifying days back in North Carolina to help my mother recover from knee surgery.

I don’t yet have a story worth telling. Still, if there’s a point to it all something resembling psychic liberation, maybe it’s this: if, as Joan Didion suggests, existence defies narrative, all the more reason for writers storytellers to keep trying to make some sense of it.

1. Joan Didion, “The White Album” (I highly recommend reading the entire collection of essays, especially “Holy Water”)