July 10 & 17, 2023 Issue

Parul Sehgal, in her absorbing “Tell No Tales,” in this week’s issue, surveys the literature of the “story skeptics” - writers and scholars who resist the “magic of storytelling.” She writes,

Meanwhile, the story skeptics trace how we have learned to live—as Jonathan Gottschall writes in “The Story Paradox”—in “unconscious obedience” to the grammar of story. Story lulls. It encourages us to overlook the fact that it is, first, an act of selection. Details are amplified or muted. Apparent irrelevancies are integrated or pruned. Each decision is an argument, each argument an imposition of meaning, each imposition an exercise of power. When applied to history, it is a process that the late scholar Hayden White termed “emplotment”—in which experience is altered when squeezed into even the most rudimentary beginning-middle-end structure. Memoirists are increasingly conscious of the toll that such arcs exact. The American poet Maggie Smith, in her new book, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” notes wryly, “It’s a mistake to think of my life as plot, but isn’t this what I’m tasked with now—making sense of what happened by telling it as a story?” 

Well, all writing is selection. Nevertheless, I agree with Sehgal that it’s a mistake to think of life in terms of story. Our lives are not like novels. It’s delusion to think they are. So … how to represent life if not by narrative? What is the alternative to story? Sehgal proposes “swarm”:

Swarm, not story: when a heroine in Elena Ferrante’s work loses the plot or floats free from it, it is that very word she reaches for—“swarm.” “Frantumaglia”—a jumble of fragments—is what Ferrante titled a collection of her nonfiction writing, deploying an expression that her mother would use to describe being “racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart.” A swarm possesses its own discipline but moves untethered. Nothing about the notion of a swarm comforts or consoles. It doesn’t contain, like a story. It allows—contradiction, dissonance, doubt, pure immanence, movement, an open destiny, an open road.

That appeals to me. Another alternative is form-finding. Galen Strawson defines it as follows:

Storytelling is a species of form-finding, and the basic model for it, perhaps, is the way in which gifted and impartial journalists or historians report a sequence of events. Obviously they select among the facts, but they do not, we suppose, distort to falsify them, and they do more than merely list them in the correct temporal order, for they also place them in a connected account. Storytelling of this sort involves the ability to detect - not invent - developmental coherencies in the manifold of one’s life. It’s one way in which one may be able to apprehend the deep personal constancies that do in fact exist in the life of every human being - although this can also be done by form-finding without storytelling. [“A Fallacy of Our Age,” included in Strawson’s 2018 essay collection Things That Bother Me]

Joan Didion: Narrativist or Nonnarrativist?

Joan Didion (Photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Joan Didion’s “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” has always bugged me. I like to think of myself as a realist. I don’t need stories to live by. Just give me the facts. I’m not alone in thinking this way. Galen Strawson, in his “A Fallacy of Our Age” (included in his Things That Bother Me, 2018), says, “The business of living well is, for many, a completely nonnarrative project.” Didion’s line appears to put her squarely in the narrativist camp. But the piece in which the line occurs – her extraordinary essay “The White Album” – seems to enact nonnarrativity. It’s a collection of fragments that “did not fit into any narrative I knew” (Didion). “I had the keys but not the key,” she says, “the key” being the master narrative that knits all her “disparate images” together. But “The White Album” does show Didion searching for that key. Narrativist or nonnarrativist? Zadie Smith, in her recent “Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking” (newyorker.com, December 24, 2021), says that when Didion wrote “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she meant it ironically, as an indictment of human delusion. I think Smith is right. “The White Album” ’s brilliantly fractured form supports her point.   

April 19, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John McPhee’s delightful “Tabula Rasa: Volume 2,” a continuation of what he calls, in Volume 1 (January 13, 2020), his “old man project.” It’s purpose? “To keep the old writer alive by never coming to an end.” Volume 2 consists of six individually configured segments: “Sloop to Gibraltar”; “December 19, 1943”; “The Dutch Ship Tyger”; “Ray Brock”; and “Writer.” Each is a miniature story, a shard chipped from McPhee’s long life. For example, “December 19, 1943” tells about a tragic incident that occurred when he was twelve. His friend Julian Boyd, age thirteen, asked him to go skating with him on the Millstone River. McPhee’s mother wouldn’t let him go, insisting he attend the church Christmas pageant. He “howled and moaned and griped and begged.” But his mother was adamant. In the end, McPhee obeyed his mom, and went to the pageant. Meanwhile, Julian and another friend, Charlie Howard, skated the river, broke through the ice, and drowned. McPhee writes, 

I did not know Charlie Howard well, and the impact of his death stopped there. Not so with Julian, whose future has remained beside me through all my extending past. That is to say, where would he have been, and doing what, when? From time to time across the decades, I have thought of writing something, tracing parallel to mine the life he would have lived, might have lived. A chronology, a chronicle, a lost C.V. But such, of course, from the first imagined day, is fiction. Actually, I have to try not to think about him, because I see those arms reaching forward, grasping nothing.

Reading this touching piece, I thought of the philosopher Galen Strawson’s observation: “In the end, luck swallows everything” (Things That Bother Me, 2018).

My favorite section of “Tabula Rasa: Volume 2” is “The Dutch Ship Tyger.” I like its branching effect – the way it starts out in one place (the Dutch merchant vessel Tyger anchored in the Hudson River, Manhattan, 1613) and ends up in a completely different time and space (the office of Leo Hofeller, executive editor of The New Yorker, 25 West Forty-third Street, Manhattan, 1964). How do you connect those dots? Well, the line runs through McPhee, through his aspiration to be a New Yorker writer. McPhee says,

In short, I was in high school when I decided that what I wanted to do in life was write for The New Yorker, in college when I first sent a manuscript to the magazine, and in college when I filed away that first rejection slip and the second and the sixteenth, then on through my twenties and into my thirties, when the whole of that collection of rejection slips could have papered a wall.

The piece is really about how McPhee at long last realized his goal. I found it fascinating. One of the turning points was the magazine’s acceptance of his “Basketball and Beefeaters” (March 16, 1963; included in his great 1975 collection Pieces of the Frame). McPhee describes the moment:

Depressed, thirty-one years old, I recklessly sent it to Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker simultaneously. A few weeks went by, another freelanced book review, and then my phone rang at Time. The New Yorker was buying the piece. Oh, my God.

That “Oh, my God” made me laugh. It’s an interesting form of indirect speech – McPhee inflecting his present-day recollection with the actual reaction he had sixty years ago. There’s more to the story. It involves a grouchy Sports Illustrated editor named Jack Tibby; it involves basketball great Bill Bradley; it involves McPhee’s brilliant profile of Bradley, “A Sense of Where You Are” (The New Yorker, January 23, 1965). The publication of that piece marks the beginning of McPhee’s amazing run of extraordinary New Yorker work, including “The Pine Barrens,” “Travels in Georgia,” “The Survival of the Bark Canoe,” “The Encircled River,” “Rising from the Plains,” “Atchafalaya,” “Coal Train,” “Season on the Chalk,” “The Orange Trapper,” right up to the appearance of this wonderful second installment of his ongoing “Tabula Rasa.” McPhee without end, amen!