with thanks to Kirsty Gunn

Our Stories and Our Lives

Why is talking about narrative so difficult? Why do we feel, as we try to do so, that we quickly sink into a quagmire from which it is impossible to escape? I think it has to do with the fact that narrative is inescapably bound up with our own lives. We live immersed in stories, making sense of our lives and even of individual episodes in them by means of the stories we tell both to ourselves and to others. Stories are as much part of us as our dreams.

This is not the case with other art forms. Poetry, painting, sculpture, music and dance may of course deploy stories to achieve their ends, but the crucial fact is that they are clearly demarcated off from life. They are outside us. They are made. But doesn’t much poetry, from the Odyssey to the work of Robert Frost, also consist of stories? You may ask. Yes indeed, but the fact that these stories are in verse immediately puts them on a different footing from prose narratives, for each time we move from one line to the next we are reminded that what we are reading is something that has been constructed, composed; whereas one of the slippery things about prose narratives is that not only is it easy to forget that they are made, but that they seem to blur the boundaries between inside and outside, between dream, fantasy and reality. We ‘lose ourselves’ in a novel ...