A Requiem For A Dream

Narrative Closure

People say that stories resemble life, but I say it is life that mirrors fiction, not the other way around.

People demand narrative closure in fiction; they want a conclusion that neatly wraps up all the plot points, make some kind of statement, and provide a feeling of completeness. All the best stories have it: the bad guys get what's coming to them, redemption is attained, salvation is reached, the nice guy ends up with the girl, etc. But even if the endings of certain stories don't conform to this model, their narrative structure is nonetheless the same: a problem and the unwrapping of the resolution of that problem. Everything comes to make sense by the end of the story, so there's coherence. The reader comes to know what caused what, what are the effects, and how the causal mechanism operates. Sydney Carton looks like Charles because he has to, or else the story cannot exist. Oedipus MUST realize his identity, or else there will be no end to the story. And along the way, each event is assigned a place within this causal machinery, each event and character working like clockwork to reach the logical, but inevitable conclusion. In essence the story is already complete, the writer just has to get the details, the routes by which the conclusion is reached. Throw in a bunch of characters, put them in a setting, and one just has to create a series of logical events that lead up, through their causal machinery, to an ending that is logically satisfying.

And life is pretty much the same, or at least our perception of it. We can't help but to perceive life as a narrative, as a story in which we are the characters. But in this story, the ending is constantly changing. We all know the beginning, but we don't know how it will end because it changes constantly. Each day brings with it its ending, until the ultimate ending: death. But with each change in the ending, our perception of our stories change. We, in essence, rewrite the past in our own mind in order to make the past fit neatly into the ending. Let's take a hypothetical scenario: a man goes to attend a party, and at his party, he meets his future wife. At the time of the party, the man could not have known that he will meet his future wife there. So there's no connection between the party and his life story. But when he gets married, he will inevitably think that if he didn't go to the party, he would not have met his wife. Boom, the past is changed because the ending has changed: that party has now taken on a meaning that it did not before, and instead of being a mere event, it has now assumed causal significance because the man has made a causal connection between the party and his wife. What is otherwise a mere occurence now becomes an integral part of his story. That is what I mean when I say that people constantly rewrite the past in their head to accomodate the present.

But I will say that this is not how life works. There is no way that the man can say with any certainty that the party, and the party alone, is the cause of his marriage. He merely assumes that because he cannot test other possible causes, but this does not make the party the sole and the true cause of his marriage. He could've not went to the party and still met his wife, but there is no way to empirically verify if the party is indeed the cause, so for the sake of narrative unity, we assume it. But this is a huge disconnect between how the mind constructs the past and how the past actually happened. What this means is that none of our narratives, the stories that we construct to create a sense of narrative around our own lives, is actually real. All the past is a series of events, and that's all it will ever be. It is simply a recording of events, and you can't even trust that because memory distorts, embellishes, and suppresses. But at it's fundamental level, the past is all the events that have occurred prior to the present. It cannot take on any causal significance because it doesn't even make sense to speak of mere events as having cause and effect when there is no way to test that claim.

And this is a discomforting thought because it really just says that none of our memories have any meaning. All the pain, joy, sacrifices, and endeavors are not what we think they are. This is especially painful for people who've rationalized and integrated certain very horrifying experiences into their story so that they also serve their own purposes. People often say that their pain made them a better person, or that their failures held a lesson, or that they say in hindsight that the past pains are the best thing to happen to them. So even these horrible experiences are somehow converted into positive things, or at least things that have purpose. But how can you ever be sure? Maybe the pain, the horror, and the anguish merely happened, and that they had nothing to do with what happened to you later on. Then what? Then you are faced with the uncomfortable realization that pain is pain, and that it has no meaning. You are forced to confront the possibility that you went through shit for nothing, and that all the bad things that have happened to you simply happened, and that your suffering ultimate has no effect, no positive influence whatsoever. Because they were merely events, something that happened that you wish to forget.

But again, the human mind cannot help but to think of the past in this narrative manner. There is no stopping it, because we just cannot conceive of the past ONLY as a series of events that occurred prior to the present. We have to rewrite history, rewrite the past so that things make sense, because I think we just cannot deal with the raw information, because there is a lot of information in the past. Instead, we suppress some information, promote others, and arrange them so that we can have a logical link from the beginning to the present end of the story. This way, we don't have to process all the information, but we only have to hold on to that story, and the past would make sense.

That is why fiction doesn't mirror life, life mirrors fiction. Fiction is just the mind's expression of its own structure and process. That is why I would be interested if anyone actually wrote fiction that mirrored life, not life as we conceive of it, but life as it actually is. That is to say, a fiction full of ambiguities, ironies, causal uncertainty, with no clear, logical conclusion. But people wouldn't read it, because they will say that it's bad writing. After all, who would want to read a story with an ordinary beginning, non-linear chronology, full of confusion and uncertainty and contradictions, insignificant characters that lead ordinary lives, with ultimately no logical payoff at the end, no tying upon of loose threads, no revelations that will somehow make the mundane events of life suddenly significant. I wouldn't want to read that book, because that is life: it is not setup like a narrative.

Posted by humanflyz at November 23, 2005 02:54 AM | TrackBack