We tell ourselves stories in order to live. [...] We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. 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. [...] During those five years I appeared, on the face of it, a competent enough member of some community or another, a signer of contracts and Air Travel cards, a citizen [...]This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer dig. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. In what would probably be the middle of my live I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cyt was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.[...]Certain of these images did not fit into any narrative I knew.
Uit: Joan Didion. The White Album. Penguin Books. Great Britain, 1979. p. 11- 13
Categorie: drama, falen van verhalen, fantasmagorie, Joan Didion, Literatuur, narrativiteit, Verhalen
