Finding Right Rhythms (Part 2)
A human self is made up of stories. —Mohsin Hamid
Part Two: Right Rhythms in Space (a consideration of narrative form and the narratives we inhabit)
In the previous installment, we considered how we inhabit time during periods of upheaval and uncertainty; here we turn to consider how a given character (the hero) conceives of and inhabits space, how s/he conceives of and inhabits home.
In E.M. Forester’s classic breakdown, there are essentially two types of stories:
1. A stranger comes to town
2. A person embarks on a journey
Note how each type begins with an initial conception of space.
In the first instance, that home space is ordered and stable until the stranger enters that familiar world and threatens of chaos. This creates an unstable situation demands rectification. Perhaps it goes without saying that the stranger in question could be an actual person/character who invades the community from the outside, or any foreign element that enters unbidden and unwelcome (at least initially). Cancer, drought, destructive storms, or even new and unsettling ideas can all enact this role of stranger, posing as they do their threat.
In the second type, the home space itself has become intolerable for one of two reasons, broadly speaking; either the order and stability have begun to erode and breakdown from within, or these have become excessively rigid and stultifying. Just as the stranger can be literal or figurative in nature, the source of this erosion or the force of unbearable rigidity can be external (individual characters, oppressive social or political structures, etc.) or internal, originating in the protagonist’s own disintegrated self.
Again, at the risk of stating the obvious, we note that, whatever form the forces of antagonism may take, the dramatic narrative, if it is a narrative in fact, will center on the plight of an individual character (the figure we’ve thus far referred to as the hero). The term protagonist comes from the Greek for first struggler. A story, by definition, begins with an unstable situation and proceeds to follow an active character (the hero) through a series of emotionally charged events which change him or her in some essential way. A re-centering must occur. The protagonist must struggle.
In Poetics, Aristotle suggests that a character is his or her desire. In a similar vein, John Gardner argues that narratives center on and are driven by characters who “want and want intensely.” Narrative-conflict emerges out of the tension between that desire and its impediment when an active character actively pursues the telos, the desired object or principle or condition in the face of real and formidable obstacles.
Triangulating Forester’s breakdown with this collision between desire and impediment, we can say that saying that the character’s desire (the core motivation at the heart of the protagonist’s struggle), whatever its particular object, can always be boiled down to one of two things:
1. I want my old life back
2. I want a better life
In the first, the catalyst arrives from the outside to crank up the narrative engine by upsetting the stasis, order, and balance. In the second, it emerges from the inside out.
And of course, many of the best stories will include elements of both types. We find a classic example in the original Shrek (2001). Initially, the stranger arrives in the form of the pesky “fairy tale things” Lord Farquaad relocates onto the hero’s land. Shrek’s desire to get his old life back prompts him to embark on a quest which takes the form of a classic hero’s journey. This begins when our hero confronts the tyrant Farquaad who’s disrupted Shrek’s order in the process of creating his own totalitarian regime; it continues as Farquaad, shirking his own responsibility, dispatches Shrek to undertake the dangerous adventure of confronting the dragon and freeing the princess.
And here we see the conflation of peril and potential writ large. Of course, confronting the dragon presents enormous risk to hero and sidekick alike. But it also holds the promise of a better, more abundant and satisfying life than Shrek could have hoped for or even begun to imagine in his ‘old life.’ He’d told himself he was happy and content, all the while ignoring and denying the deeper desire for connection, intimacy, and a sense of belonging.
It may seem absurd to speak this way about an animated movie about ogres and a talking donkey, but the more I think about this, the more nuanced and intricate the narrative appears. That is maybe the subject of another, more focused essay; note for now how what Shrek “wants and wants intensely” morphs and evolves over the course the narrative as the sidekick Donkey pushes him into deepening levels of self-awareness. As Donkey challenges Shrek to confront his denial, admit to the painful aspects of his loneliness and isolation, and risk the vulnerability of entering into relationships, we witness Shrek’s transformation from a guarded, hard-hearted, emotionally dead cynic to a caring empath capable of meaningful connection.
In narrative terms, by the time he accomplishes his primary goal of reclaiming his swamp, it’s no longer his goal. What he thought he wanted wasn’t what he wanted after all.
The quest becomes, more than anything, a quest for his truest, best, most authentic self. That journey of self-discovery amounts to a growing consciousness of the dangerous lies he’s believed himself about his own self-sufficiency and the corresponding awareness of his own limitations and his fundamental need for a sense of true belonging in the context of a community that will also honor and hold space his unique and individual autonomy.
A stranger comes to town, a person takes a trip; I want my old life back, I want a better life. Often, as in Shrek, these catalytic forces which trigger or initiate the narrative will overlap and interweave in dynamic ways. And sometimes, all too often in fact, a story begins in the first mode morphs into the second as the impossibility of the task leads to a reconsideration of the telos itself. The stranger enters and shakes things up in ways that threaten our sense of who we are and what we stand for; in the course of the struggle to reestablish order, we come to understand that things needed shaking and that what first appeared as a curse is in fact a blessing in disguise. Or the desire for the old life encounters the hard reality that the home-space and all it represents has been irretrievably lost, prompting the hero to adapt—generally after a period of dissolution—and gather what fragments seem worth salvaging and begin to pursue or to build a better life after all. Or the hero breaks free of the too-rigid environment of home only to encounter an equally unbearable chaos at every turn and returns home with a new appreciation for the comforting familiarity of the old structures and forms.
The story recorded in Chapter 15 of Luke’s gospel, commonly known as the “Parable of the Prodigal Son”—which might better, more accurately be titled “The Tale of the Loving and Patient Father and his Two Lost Sons”—provides an intricate and germane case in point. In the beginning, the younger son sets out pursuing his desire for a better, freer life, and though the endeavor seems to succeed initially, he soon finds his new mode of being unsustainable and ultimately intolerable. “But when he came to himself,” as the story goes, his telos reverted to the longing for the old, disrupted life restored, if only in a limited and partial way. Acting on that altered desire, he embarks on a return journey toward the stability of the father’s house which he found so intolerable previously.
Meanwhile, the older son has remained ensconced in that ordered existence, though he seems to find it no less tolerable than his brother. As recorded in verses 28-29, his response to the father’s invitation to join the feast celebrating the wayward son’s return reveals a bitter, spiteful man consumed with resentment and hatred—a man who characterizes his own existence in bleak, joyless terms but lacks the heroic courage to admit this to himself. In blaming his misery on father and brother alike, he denies his own responsibility to take the necessary action to escape or change the intolerable situation.
Intriguingly, however, Jesus leaves this second act of the story untold and incomplete. We hear the older brother grousing but do not get his answer to the father’s final impassioned plea. Given the original context and the primary audience for this particular story—the grumbling Pharisees and scribes, who clearly disapproved of Jesus’ innovative approach to, interpretation of, and dynamic interaction with their rigid, static tradition—he seems to be inviting his hearers to inhabit the narrative and decide for themselves how it will end.
It is an invitation he extends to all hearers in all times and all places. As Christian Wiman observes, “Christ speaks in stories as a way of preparing his followers to stake their lives on a story, because existence is not a puzzle to be solved, but a narrative to be inherited and undergone and transformed person by person.”
This underscores the deeper truth that we humans value stories and spend so much time, energy, and other resources engaged in constructing, consuming, and connecting through stories because in a fundamental sense, our lives consist of stories. Or as Mohsin Hamid puts it, “a human self is made up of stories. These stories are rooted partly in experience, and partly in fantasy.” We humans exist as living, breathing storylines—complex, intricate patchworks of overlapping, interwoven, multilayered, architectonic narratives which together form the whole of our personalities and our beings.
Questions of narrative identity, then, are among the most important we might ask. What narratives do we see ourselves inhabiting collectively and separately as we inhabit this moment in time? Where do we locate ourselves within that narrative? And how or why does it matter in terms of how we understand who and what we are and mean, who and what God is and means, who and what others are and mean? And finally what action or set of actions might this understanding require us to engage in as we struggle against the forces of chaos on the one hand, and rigidity on the other?
