Narrating My Distress

20 Oct, 2024

Beware the little asides you toss off; they might just come back and demand more attention. That’s what’s happened this week with two pretty casual points I made in two of my recent posts here: one, a simple mention of Byung-Chul Han; the other, the memory of a family member’s long-ago remark that’s continued to disturb me ever since I heard it.

The first just drove me to a Han book that I’ve been wanting to read for a while: The Crisis of Narration, which to sum up far too simply, alleges that we in the digital era have largely lost the ability, much less the desire, to narrate anything.¹ We can use the information and facts and records that just keep piling up every day to explain some phenomena or solve some concrete problems or make a guess at correlations or causality; we can even engage in “storytelling” to convince people to buy a product or service. But none of that leads, for example, to remembering, to comprehension or understanding or the construction or maintenance of community; none of that allows for what Han calls the lingering and listening, which have nothing to do with optimization or efficiency or metrics, required to ground or “orient” us and help us puzzle through existence.

One of the contributing factors here is what Han and many others before him have called “the disenchantment of the world,” which “can be reduced to the formula: things are, but they are mute. The magic evaporates from them. The pure facticity of existence makes narrative impossible.”² In this situation, we assume that causal explanations are the only means of helping us make sense of what surrounds us. We seem unwilling or unable to recognize the fact that “causality is only one kind of relationship,” one that results in conclusions very different from those found in “[a] magical world... in which things enter into relations with each other that are not ruled by causal connections—relations in which things exchange intimacies…. Magical and poetical relationships to the world rest on a deep sympathy that connects humans and things.”

Han’s not saying here that there’s an either/or choice between what we’d think of as pure scientific causality and, say, voodoo or faith healing or even familiar sideshow card tricks or visual feints aimed at entertainment. A magical world, in Han’s view, is not an unquestioning universe in which if you just “believe,” everything will be made clear (enough) and turn out all right. Instead, those magical and poetical relationships—which might include the more ordinary categories of friendship or wonder—require patience and attention and the slow effort of piecing together clues and bridging gaps, the often hard and sometimes frightening work of looking beyond simple answers and justifications. Spell-casting and dark arts they are not; instead, the magical is akin to what Claude Lévi-Strauss called the “meaningful, which is the highest mode of being of the rational.”³

Here’s what’s connecting that all to the still-disturbing memory I mentioned, in which a child was reminded that the only reason she was being allowed to read Harry Potter was because she was keeping front and center the admonition that “magic isn’t real.” In the (eerily ridiculous) anti-pagan move my relative thought she was making, what she was also employing was a blunt, unstated formula that grounded her approach to getting through the world: if something is explicitly labeled as being to the greater glory of Jesus, whatever it is, whether extravagant living or invading a country or pulling a rabbit out of a hat, is OK; if not explicitly declared as such, it’s to be denounced.⁴ Of course, in reality the conveniences we’ve grown used to don’t even come in for consideration in one category or the other; mute practical practices such as shopping at Amazon and slapping up PowerPoints for a sermon simply are. They’re indifferent tools that make life run more smoothly, and hence, are just fine. It’s in the realm of the impractical, the inefficient, the inexplicit—the imaginative realm where we linger with meaning and explore what’s just hanging out there in the world for no particular reason, where we read a story about kids at a unique boarding school—that things get dangerous.

This is not to say that my relative’s brand of religiosity is narrative-free—we can, after all, have bad narratives—only that religion of this sort seems to boil down to possession of the information needed to explain things. Not a grounding sensibility to help you think through an enigma or tricky situation, but clear rules and clear labels you can point to for justifying what you do, even if those rules or labels don’t make sense were you to stop and consider them. Although this sort of “faith” does hold on to a sort of story that it tells about itself, it doesn’t get to the point of connecting or examining the isolated scenes and sayings it employs to back up its regulations and support its own understanding of causality (be faithful and triumph; stray from the path and be eternally damned). For a system whose grounding is based on some very supernatural (magical in the traditional sense) occurrences—a disembodied power bringing a dead man back to some sort of life, while at the same time making it possible for that latter being to have full comprehension of all our thoughts and feelings—the denial or condemnation of magic or magical possibilities, or even poetry, seems more than a little disingenuous.

What appears to be going on is simply that this religion-as-rules sort of view has taken a trippy story, shorn it of its gray areas (its never-solved narrative), and turned it into an operating manual so that followers will have an unclouded view of how the world works and how they fit within those operations.⁵ The manual’s clearly laid-out mode of causality is the only valid one; outside of that, everything else is (easily, tidily dismissed as) evil and ineffective. It follows, then, that in turning what should be an ever-developing narrative into a mere legal code or operating manual, the community that makes use of it becomes a disenchanted one, unable to see, and afraid of, the sympathies full existence offers. Among other unfortunate results, potential sympathies decay into unthinking antipathies, and we’re left with bombs of us-them invective that are anything but enchanting.

True to the essay form—a perhaps conclusionless attempt at working through a thought—I’m trying to see if Han can help me grapple with what’s bothering me about the sensibility of a family member. Is this part of the process of narration, laying out what I know and attempting to figure out how to make sense of and come to terms with—not just explain—a particular situation? Maybe. But the narrative at this point needs some further development, and if it winds up having a satisfactory ending—if I end up succeeding in, as Han says, narrating my way free of my distress—it’s going to take some time and lots more thought to get there.⁶

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