Tuesday 19 May 2015

Narratives again ... this time from Will Self

In his sympathetic review of Oliver Sacks' new autobiography, On The Move, Will Self remarks:

Oliver Sacks, the eminent neurologist and writer, whose many books have done perhaps more than any other body of work to explain the mysteries of the brain to a general readership, is a strong supporter of the “narrativity” theory of the human subject. Suitably enough – given this is an autobiography – Sacks restates the notion here: “Each of us … constructs and lives a ‘narrative’ and is defined by this narrative.” Elsewhere he asserts: “I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.” Setting to one side the truth or otherwise of this contention (personally I think it’s only the social being that is narrated – to ourselves we are always “such stuff as dreams are made of”), for a man who views his life in dramatic terms, On the Move presents the reader with some quite startling narrative leaps.

Burkeman on Narratives

Fascinating piece by Oliver Burkeman on narratives

Could you have a meaningful life without this sense of continuity, this feeling that you are the person to whom your childhood happened, and who’ll experience your old age? Surely nobody could think of the scenes of their life – childhood summers, first kisses, bereavements – as lacking any connecting thread whatsoever?

But Galen Strawson, another philosopher, says this is exactly how he experiences the world, and he suspects he’s not alone. “I have a past, like any human, [and] I have a respectable amount of factual knowledge about it,” he concedes in Against Narrativity, a 2004 paper highlighted recently by the behavioural scientist Jess Whittlestone. “Yet I have no sense of my life as a narrative with form.”