Sorry it's been so long (seems I keep saying this), but I appear to never be near a computer (or have the time at the moment when I am near) when I feel like writing something. This morning I have both. I had been thinking about the relationship of narrative to learning, given the decline in interest in literature among students these days (and a preference for film and animation, but that's another topic on the privileging of the visual and spoken over the textual and the written), when I heard an interview with Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue about their film "Body of War."
She discussed her interest in opening up discussion about the unseen home costs of the Iraq war and about how she had to find someone around whom to build the analysis, a narrative story on which to hang things; it's the way you make a documentary. Then she meets Donahue who has met this young man at Walter Reed and was looking for someone to tell his story. Even though he tells it differently, my belief is that the narrative was already in his head (just like it was in hers) and he found Thomas Young (as she found Donahue) to be the best vehicle for that pre-determined narrative.
I also read Elizabeth Edwards op-ed in the NY Times where she lays out tellingly how the MSM (I just love the pejorative use of acronyms) looks for narrative tropes, finds candidates who fit them, and then spends most of their coverage spining out those narrative stories. If you don't fit a good narrative niche (or if your the second one to try to inhabit it), good luck getting any substantial coverage. The reporters have stories they want to tell and need to find real human beings around on which to hang them.
In both cases, the broad outlines of the story exist first; the characters (real people) are chosen second to flesh the story out. The point being is that narratives from our culture, determined to a large degree by history and literature, condition what we look for in the world, and we often start with these a priori desires and than find evidence in the world to fit them, only to step back and claim that what we have is empirical, discovered through an unimpassioned search for the truth (which is itself a narrative of a certain kind), when in fact, we already had what we believe to be the truth and are seeking only illustrative and persuasive examples of it.
Then again, this whole entry may also be confirmation of what I just wrote: I had a conclusion and found supporting evidence for it, so now I'm publishing it, possibly ignoring any contradictory evidence since I'm so sure I'm right here. Perhaps what we need is not only healthy skepticism about the MSM, but also about ourselves, about how powerful our own accepted narratives, often drawn from fiction (or fictionalized history) determine our world views.
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