Fiction for survival

The second time I went to the First Me church on Whitehomer Road was shortly after moving back to Clintonville looking for a job. (The first time was an Easter service way back during graduate school, which didn't stick and doesn't count.) But the second time, the minister was on vacation, so there were two lay speakers who talked about a method they had used as counselors to help people see themselves differently and find a way through their most sticky problems. Dave and Laura called it 'restorying'.

The major premise is that there is a narrative going on all the time. There's a postmodern school of literary theorists who like to call this the 'text'. Your job is a text; your family life is a text; your social life is a text; a basketball game is a text. Stanley Fish wrote a book called Does This Course Have a Text? So you get the idea: everything, not just printed, verbal accounts of things, can be seen and "read" as a narrative.

The minor premise, according to Dave and Laura, is that everybody constructs their own narrative of their own life, selectively working with the facts they are given. There's the rub! We don't choose our parents, siblings, birthplace, birth order, or what happens to us, but we do string together those facts in a way that somehow hangs together and makes sense. We also don't choose what other people choose to make of it, what conclusions they draw, and what meaning they give to the story.

It gets hairy when someone's version of the story does damage. That's when it's time for some restorying, according to Dave and Laura. My favorite novelist, John Barth, who is at least as serious about making art as Dave and Laura were about doing therapy, would call it fiction for survival. Barth is all about getting into the writing/living/rewriting of the life/story, which makes his writing convoluted and his characters complex. Like most people living an examined life.

This is a process I have returned to many times over the years, and most of it is boringly self-involved and not for publication. There have been other times where the writing of the song of myself spilled over the boundary in ways that should have been instructive, had I been paying attention. And maybe someday those episodes will find their way into a narrative I first committed to writing during graduate school, when the movement/discourse analogy began to crystalize into a group of fictional characters.

This miserable post has been sitting in my outbox fermenting for weeks (months?) now, so it's either ripe or about to "turn" - just as the would-be manuscript of self-revelatory metafiction has been sitting in a manila file folder and floppy disk so long there is no computer alive that will read it. But I continue to scribble Mitty-esque paragraphs that go in a drawer, because as Anthony Burgess said, the important thing is to keep writing.