Chapter 6
Narrative
Once upon a time, literature meant above all poetry. The novel was a
modern upstart, too close to biography or chronicle to be genuinely
literary, a popular form that could not aspire to the high callings of lyric
and epic poetry. But in the twentieth century the novel has eclipsed
poetry, both as what writers write and what readers read and, since the
1960s, narrative has come to dominate literary education as well.
People still study poetry – often, it is required – but novels and short
stories have become the core of the curriculum.
This is not just a result of the preferences of a mass readership, who
happily pick up stories but seldom read poems. Literary and cultural
theory have increasingly claimed cultural centrality for narrative.
Stories, the argument goes, are the main way we make sense of things,
whether in thinking of our lives as a progression leading somewhere or
in telling ourselves what is happening in the world. Scientific
explanation makes sense of things by placing them under laws –
whenever a and b obtains, c will occur – but life is generally not like that.
It follows not a scientific logic of cause and effect but the logic of story,
where to understand is to conceive of how one thing leads to another,
how something might have come about: how Maggie ended up selling
software in Singapore, how George’s father came to give him a car.
We make sense of events through possible stories; philosophers of
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