Narrative Addiction (MHP Column 12.05)

Let us adopt a diagnostic pose towards this illness. We should first describe its symptoms before we chart a prudent route to retreat.


One symptom is denial. This involves the paradoxical ability to both actually believe something like we are being charitably shot into space on the BBC’s tab and to suspend judgment on the ethical concerns of voyeuristically imposing such deceptive manipulations of reality on others. Like the fifth column actors in the Space Tourism Agency, it is to pretend that opening this sealed hatch will result in all of us being sucked out into space and exploding in a vacuum, when we will really just be tumbling down into a nest of electrical cords and startled production assistants. To raise these concerns is to confirm the illusion, to point out that this reality wears narrative’s clothes.


Another symptom is a blind craving for more, for more seasons of Average Joe, more episodes of The Apprentice, the next installment of The Simple Life. Evangelists used to speak of the God-shaped vacuum in each of us, but now there is another one vying for equal attention and it is shaped like narrative. Perhaps these vacuums overlap somehow, perhaps one is indicative of the other, but either way our need to feed this new strangely shaped narrative hole begins to corrupt our expectations and we begin to demand narrative from the merchants of other forms of experience (such as advertising, journalism, and the news media).


Other symptoms of narrative addiction may include the loss of appetite for less interesting forms of realism, a general disdain for less straightforward uses of narrative, or people will start finding stacks of Reader’s Digest hidden in our handbags.


I must confess that this new reality TV series has been for me what they call a “moment of clarity.” It has drawn my attention to a growing narrative addiction in my own daily routine. These civilians prepare themselves nervously for re-entry according to the detailed procedures rehearsed weeks in advance. The shuttle lands, the hatches open, steam billows, and they emerge victoriously into the glare of studio lights and cameras scattered about a giant sound stage. What a perfectly dehumanizing moment. Sure, the joke’s on them, but the serious, complicated, and subtle joke is really on us.


The Advent


I don’t mean here to disparage narrative, far from it. The resurrected appreciation for narrative and story in contemporary Christian theology has been a victory hard won by the tireless academic pursuits of many theologians and critics intent on breathing life into the tiresome paradigms of an bygone age. Like many addictions, narrative addiction is simply the abuse of behaviors that would in other contexts of use be appropriate, if not vital to sensible living. And I am also intent on criticizing a specific sort of narrative, a mercenary sort that preys on our natural bent on thinking of ourselves and our experience in terms of story. So how is it that narrative addicts recover a proper sense of narrative, reorient themselves to more responsible forms of reality, and re-engage the task of living in a world that demands a finely tuned awareness of story?


There is something promising about the recent publication of the first few installments of Canongate’s series of myths. In this endeavor, contemporary authors will revisit classical mythology, searching for the ancient sense of myth that had been undercut by the politicized rendering of the term in the early work of Roland Barthes, and drawing us back towards Thomas Mann’s definition of myth as “lived fictions.” With the increased attention on Tolkien and Lewis in recent days (ironically as a result of films produced by companies that could very well be accused of fostering narrative addiction in recent times), myth has also become a hot topic in Christian dialogue. Chesterton also talked about myth, the “a lost art,” that stands in distinction to narrative and religion, a way of holding in tension self-narration and the mysteriousness of the past. Perhaps a few healthy doses of myth will help to sooth the cravings of the narrative addict.


However, recent appropriations of “myth” itself are not without their problems, and run the risk of the same fate that some forms of narrative have faced as of late. That is another issue for another column (the shortcomings of Karen Armstrong’s contribution to the Canongate Press series in the first volume A Short History of Myth deserve a healthy rejoinder). For now, I take it as a token gesture from the architects of faith that Advent is right around the corner.


The season of Advent present to the narrative addict a set of circumstances rife with opportunities for healing. Sure it is a story, and I always look forward to the dramatic recitation of Luke 2 and the editing of the birth narratives into church plays, pantomimes, and lawn ornaments. And there is a sense in which it is myth, an originating Christian metaphor, a storied incarnation of the abstract Word becoming flesh.


But Advent celebrates a more sustained meeting of reality and narrative than the one sought by narrative addicts. It is story with a capital “S” entering time and space, the point at which God’s narrative and man’s narrative collide.


Unlike these ersatz astronauts, who will step out of their space capsule to discover the reality sham behind their narrated experience, we will step out of the Advent season right into the very world evoked by the incarnation. There is no reality studio disconnect between the artifice of the narrative and the state of affairs to which it refers. At the very least, Advent is an opportunity to clothe oneself in a much more profound sense of narrative offered to us than reality TV and contemporary advertising, and perhaps the seed of a potent antidote to the perils of narrative addiction. I look forward to celebrating this year’s great Moment of Clarity with others who may as well wish to emerge from the past months of flawed narratives.