In an otherwise excellent op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times, Elizabeth Edwards bemoans the narrative logic that organizes political campaign coverage:

Watching the campaign unfold, I saw how the press gravitated toward a narrative template for the campaign, searching out characters as if for a novel: on one side, a self-described 9/11 hero with a colorful personal life, a former senator who had played a president in the movies, a genuine war hero with a stunning wife and an intriguing temperament, and a handsome governor with a beautiful family and a high school sweetheart as his bride. And on the other side, a senator who had been first lady, a young African-American senator with an Ivy League diploma, a Hispanic governor with a self-deprecating sense of humor and even a former senator from the South standing loyally beside his ill wife. Issues that could make a difference in the lives of Americans didn’t fit into the narrative template and, therefore, took a back seat to these superficialities.

I understand her frustration, but I am skeptical that rejecting narrative templates is a desirable, or even a possible solution. People construct their understanding of the world through narratives, not chains of logical argument. Even in domains where the latter predominate, like science, there is usually a move to the narrative mode when discussing the larger implications of one’s argument. So the idea that we’re going to somehow replace our narrative templates with something else seems like a non-starter. Better to focus on how our repetoire of narrative templates might be expanded, and how groups outside centers of power might sucessfully disseminate narratives that communicate their ideas.

My pleasure reading over the last couple of weeks has been W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the story of a man who is haunted throughout his life by his inability, or unwillingness, to remember his origins. Last night, I was reading Anthony Giddens for a class on memory and archives that I’m taking this semester, and I came across a passage that perfectly describes Sebald’s eponymous protagonist:

Giddens on ontological insecurity (click image for context).

Both Austerlitz and the anonymous narrator repeatedly remark on his feelings of disconnection from and aversion to the flow of time, and throughout the book Sebald makes the reader feel what it is to experience time as “a series of discrete moments,” as when he describes a massive clock in a railway station:

During the pauses in our conversation we both noticed what an endless length of time went by before another minute had passed, and how alarming seemed the movement of the hand, which resembled a sword of justice, even though we were expecting it every time it jerked forward, slicing off the next one-sixtieth of an hour from the future and coming to a halt with such a menacing quiver that one’s heart almost stopped.

Giddens discusses the “ontologically insecure individual” as if he were a deviation from the norm, where normality is defined in terms of being able to sustain an autobiographical narrative. Certainly that is the assumption of narrative psychologists, who analyze the stories people tell about themselves and correlate mental health with tales of redemption, told in the third person. They would no doubt reward Austerlitz’s melancholy and fragmented first-person recollections with a cocktail of prescription drugs. But maybe Austerlitz isn’t such an oddball. Zygmunt Bauman contends that the linear, novelistic experience of time has been replaced in our current society by what he calls “pointillist time”:

Bauman on pointillist time (click image for context).

If Bauman is right, ontological insecurity is now the norm, and whatever autobiographical narratives we do manage to piece together function only retrospectively, rather than motivating our future plans and actions.

Goes to:

Reckless, Walter C. (1933). Vice in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

I have visions of a sociology conference of the 1930s, a hard-looking man at the bar with his drink. “They call me Reckless.” Finishes the drink. “I study vice.”