Somewhat tangentially (but tied to the type of pan-narrativism that I used to go up against when writing about games), there is an ongoing discussion about whether we constitute our identities through narratives what we make about ourselves, or not.
Galen Strawson covers it well, The Dangerous Idea that Life is a Story. Here is Jeremy Bruner quoted:
In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives”.
Strawson argues that it may well be that many people really do conceive their lives as having narrative form, episodes, arcs, but that this is not universal.
I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves.
[…] it does seem that there are some deeply Narrative types among us, where to be Narrative with a capital ‘N’ is (here I offer a definition) to be naturally disposed to experience or conceive of one’s life, one’s existence in time, oneself, in a narrative way, as having the form of a story, or perhaps a collection of stories, and – in some manner – to live in and through this conception. The popularity of the narrativist view is prima facie evidence that there are such people.
Perhaps. But many of us aren’t Narrative in this sense. We’re naturally – deeply – non-Narrative. We’re anti-Narrative by fundamental constitution. It’s not just that the deliverances of memory are, for us, hopelessly piecemeal and disordered, even when we’re trying to remember a temporally extended sequence of events. The point is more general. It concerns all parts of life, life’s ‘great shambles’, in the American novelist Henry James’s expression. This seems a much better characterisation of the large-scale structure of human existence as we find it. Life simply never assumes a story-like shape for us. And neither, from a moral point of view, should it.
Are you the narrative type? I am not. I have already been an avid reader of novels, but never conceived my own life that way.
Hello, Mr. Juul. Brother Zizek tells us that the innermost story / narrative we tell ourselves about ourselves is simply complete B.S. (I’ve often considered life a particularly cheesy dime store existential cyberpunk survival horror novel, composed in a public toilet on a heavily modified ZX Spectrum 48k by a pseudo-cynical romantic and chronic airplane masturbator on heavy nootropics called Geoff.)
@ Robert That too. The question is how much of a story we make, how much we believe in it, and to what extent we want to believe in such a story.
I have to applaud raising this question. As a game designer embedded in the theatre, I developed as an artist with the idea that humans build narrative in all circumstances, even in, or rather, especially in, the absence of overt narrative from the individual or group which produces those circumstances. Hence the need for mid-20th century art critics to impose narrative meaning on abstract expressionists like Pollock.
That said, ludic studies reminds us constantly that all game activities vacillate between structural imperatives and the need for unrestrained playful response. My first response to what you have here is that you are finding one category of game and play which shows this same dichotomy: narrative-driven lives are impelled by paidea, non-narrative lives by ludus.
I don’t know if this advances the thought much or merely reframes it, but it makes the idea stronger for me, at least.
@Stuart Yes, the art critic angle is interesting.