Stories

It may seem odd to consult literature professors about war. But human beings are story-telling animals: we face chaos with narrative. We try to find a plot line according to which we are in the process of getting somewhere. We try to organize the irrational, uncontrollable, impossibly profuse events of our lives into dramas with beginnings, middles and ends. And war is among the most traditional subjects of narration, beginning with the Homer's Iliad and the great epic of India, the Mahabharata.

9.11 was a radical break in the story we were in up to that point: an explosion of the bizarre into the fairly neat narrative of our country and our lives. It ripped our story apart, and continues to frustrate attempts to put it back together in any comforting way.

From the start, there was the unsettling sense that it is a story with no clear end. The families of the people who never came out of the World Trade Center had to decide when the wait was over, had to decide to give up hope. Missing became dead when they said so, not because there was any moment of resolution but because the weight of despair had reached critical mass.

Similarly, the war on terrorism is unlikely to provide a neat plot arc or a clear resolution. Even if we are successful in Afghanistan, terrorism remains as a permanent possibility. Since the Iliad, war stories have ended with a victory and a defeat. This one is likely to elude those categories completely.

Peter Brooks, a professor at Yale who wrote "Reading for the Plot," attributes some of current anguish to the fact that "no sense of an end is in sight, in fact no sense even of what an end would look like. A world rid of terrorism? Not very likely. So some of our present anguish comes from a feeling of open-endedness, of terrifying no-end-in-sightness."

Seymour Chatman of Berkeley, author of "Story and Discourse," wonders if the fictional narratives of the twentieth century will perhaps provide models for dealing with this situation. "Early on in the last century there was a great shift from the cozy conclusions of Victorian and Edwardian fiction to the modernist and postmodernist "inconclusive" endings of fictions--all the way from Virginia Woolf and Hemingway to contemporary writers like [Margaret] Atwood and Ann Tyler and Raymond Carver. I bet that readers who appreciate the "non-resolving" kinds of plots are better able to deal with the anxiety of uncertainty in real life."

Robert Scholes, a professor at Brown and author of "The Nature of Narrative," reads the current conflict as a clash of narratives, and as an opportunity to rethink the story of our lives. We are, he says, "living in a world where our modern narrative of material success in life is running into a very different narrative that calls our values into question. We have, for some time, pretended that other people's narratives were inconsequential. They were bit players in our lives, we were not bit players in theirs. It scares us to be inconsequential, as we are to Osama bin Laden and his fellow believers."

For Scholes, the traditional cultures of Islam provide a different sort of narrative structure than does the materialist West, and we are now presented with an opportunity to reassess and not merely reassert our narrative. For that, we'd better understand their story.

The Islamic narrative, as told by fundamentalists like the Taliban, is a story of truth against lies, of believers against infidels, of tradition against change. Our materialism, our decadence, our domination of world economies and values, our support of Israel's oppression of Palestinians are all ways they tell a story about us that enables them to fly planes into our buildings. We are evil and should be destroyed.

The temptation is to counter this with a story that is just as simple: good against evil, freedom against theocracy, progress against crippling backwardness. Our story even has a villain with a moustache.

Let us stop telling such a simple story. For that the terrorists understand us as mere symbols of evil allowed them to kill thousands of us indiscriminately. And now the story we are trying to make of our war and our final victory seeks to return their darkness upon them.

The nineteenth-century Christian philosopher Kierkegaard thought of religious experience as the destruction of story, as the interruption of narrative by something that exceeds our grasp and shatters our assumptions. In that sense, 9.11 was a religious experience. It was an annihilation of the neat way we try to organize time and organize ourselves within time. Instantaneously, it brought us face to face with death, with God, and with ourselves.

The central bit of the Mahabharata - the text known as the Bhagavad Gita - is a story of war as a spiritual discipline. The God Krishna urges his disciples to fight even when it is not clear that fighting is the right thing to do, to fight in awareness of the complexity of the real situation.

Our instant response to 9.11 is to reinstitute our simple story, fly a flag, make it all part of our continuing progress. Perhaps that makes sense. But we have also lived through something that breaks our stories apart.

Rather than a clash of narratives, or the anguish that arises from not being able to see the end, our present condition shows us the limitations of narrative for understanding our lives and our history. In reality there are no clear endings, or even clear beginnings. The complexity of life always exceeds the ability of our stories to capture it. I wonder, can we live without a clear or simple story? And I wonder, can we live with the story we are telling?

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