At the end of the popular, Best-Picture-near-miss La La Land , there is an idealized montage that shows Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastianâs (Ryan Gosling) relationship as it might have been. Scenes are reshot from slightly different angles, with different lighting and a softer focus. The characters move toward each other more confidently than they do in the original version, their interactions are smoother, simpler, more direct. We are shown a not-quite-true version that reveals to us the beauty of the failed relationship with all the heightened emotion that comes along with the swelling music and quick cuts of the montage format. Weâve already seen what is, theoretically, the real version of their relationship (in this fictional film), so this is an odd move. We are shown something that is not true, but still meaningful. It still tells us something about the relationship. Relationships are mostly played out in our heads, after all, and this lets us into how it felt, even if it wasnât, strictly speaking, true.
The example from this film can be viewed as a microcosm of how we think of the value of stories in relation to truth now. The fact that it was both popular and critically acclaimed is also important, because it can tell us something about how the culture that produced and consumed it thinks about the role and value of stories. In La La Land , the true story is important and takes up nearly the whole film; however, the two-minute montage tells us something the true story canâtâit shows us the beauty and emotional heft of an often unhappy and unhealthy relationship. The fact that the film was so popular shows that we, as a culture, buy it.
Popular examples abound. In I, Tonya , we get two versions of the abusive relationship between Harding (Margot Robbie) and her first husband. There are mockumentary-style interviews followed by reenactments of each participantâs version of the story, each alleging the other is abusive. Which version is true? The film doesnât comment. The film seems to say that both versions are true to the tellers, and the objective truth is beside the point.
Stories have long been held in suspicion as vehicles for knowledge by postmodernists (and now politicians as well), but stories are also psychologically important. They help us understand our societies and our roles in them. They help us build our sense of self. Films like La La Land and I, Tonya show us that this nuanced understanding of stories is resonating with contemporary audiences. This indicates a more general change in attitude about the role and value of fiction that has filtered out of discourses about narrative in postmodernism.
Stories like these began appearing in literature in English around 30 years ago, and it is in these stories told in multiple versions that this shift in attitude is most clearly visible. Several very popular novelists have found various ways to tell two versions of their stories and to tell us why they have done so. The most obvious is, perhaps, Ian McEwan who, in Atonement , describes a pair of lovers who are separated during World War II and then are reunited and able to live out their days together. Then, we learn that that version was not true: They were both killed during the war and not reunited. McEwanâs narrator insists that the first version of the story isnât a lie exactlyâshe extols its value for a number of reasons. Or take Yann Martelâs Life of Pi , about a boy who survives on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, at least in the first telling. It turns out it was really a cruel man and the tiger was a metaphor. At the end, two people who hear the tale, stand-ins for the reader, decide that the allegorical version has more value, and decide to consider it true. Or take Alice Munroâs short stories. Many of them split into two versions as bits of the past are revealed, the most prominent of which features a narrator who learns two different versions of her parentsâ history and chooses the fictional version, because it helps her see them as she thinks they really were.
What all these narrators are doing is finding value in the fictional. And it isnât just these obvious examplesâmany, many more books contain implied multiple versions. That is, their narrators hint that they cannot tell the true story, but they narrate what they think they know anyway. These novels respond to postmodernist challenges to the value of fiction. Fredric Jameson famously wrote that postmodernism was âdepthlessâ (9), value-free âpasticheâ (16). Jean-François Lyotard argued that postmodernism was incredulous toward âmetanarratives â (xxiv). For novelists to argue that fiction has value, they would have to turn their backs on decades of theoretical discourse.
Yet these books donât seem to leave postmodernism behind. Many people have called them postmodern, and indeed, their deep epistemological uncertainty and their reflexive nature may make them seem postmodern. But they also donât feel postmodern. All the films, novels and stories Iâve mentioned above tell mimetic stories that mostly feel like realism, even though, sometimes, they remind us that realism isnât possible.
It is in this duality that I see the emergence of post-postmodernism. By both telling stories and reminding us that they know that they canât tell stories, these writers are trying to feel their way forward without forgetting the past.
This book is about the connection between narrative and knowledge throughout the twentieth century and the state of storytelling in contemporary literature in English. We all tell stories every day to explain our lives to others (and to ourselves). If the way we think about stories is changing, it means that the way that we think is changing too.
1.1 Moving Past-postmodernism
In order to understand the contemporary novel, it is essential to understand how writers have worked past postmodernism. How can we continue to tell stories once many writers and theorists have forcefully argued that stories canât meaningfully convey knowledge? I argue that an important group of contemporary writers both accept the lessons of their postmodernist predecessors and, at the same time, try to find a way to tell mimetic stories by both calling attention to what they canât know and attempting to remind us of the unique types of information that narrative can convey.
In this chapter, I trace the growing awareness that stories cannot replicate lived experience in modernist literature. For example, in Virginia Woolfâs Between the Acts , the characters stage a play that raises concerns about representations of history, and in Jean-Paul Sartreâs Nausea , a writer struggles to turn a life into a biography. Postmodernist writers built on this awareness with novels like Fowlesâs The French Lieutenantâs Woman , which takes pains to show us the epistemological limits of narrative in numerous asides that break the realist veneer of the novel, highlighting the instability of knowledge. This is especially relevant for narrative-based knowledge; Jean-François Lyotard defined postmodernism as an unwillingness to believe in the stories that justified the way our society operates from legal, moral and even scientific perspectives. In my view, understanding narrativeâs ability to convey knowledge is key to understanding the change between postmodernist and contemporary novels. Dutch literary theorist Nicoline Timmer writes âit is not unthinkable that after endless proposals for deconstructions, a desire to construct will breakthroughâ (21). I think that this desire to construct manifests itself in the desire to build narratives.
The desire to construct narratives is most visible in the books I call âreflexive double narratives,â works that include two or more versions of their stories and comment on why they have done so. I view these books as essential to understanding the theoretical stance of many contemporary writers. (I discuss them in âThe Quality of Qualiaâ). In his 2006 book Unnatural Voices, Brian Richardson calls the technique of including multiple versions of a story in a novel âdenarrationâ (naming it after narrative theorist Gerald Princeâs notion of âdisnarrationâ). Richardson and others have tended to treat these works as aberrant among literary novels, but I think that understanding why writers are using this narrative technique can help us to understand the difference between postmodern and post-postmodern works. Many of the novels and stories I look at tell a story and then reveal that the story we have been given is fictional (within an already fictional story) and then give us the so-called true version of events. This opens a space for the narrator to speak discursively about the things that fiction can, and sometimes does, give readers.
1.2 The Value of Fiction
The use of denarration often allows the author to argue or imply that the fictional version of events is somehow truer than the true story and, in so doing, makes an argument for why these stories need to exist and, ultimately, for the value of fiction. This is notable because for both postmodernists and the contemporaneous structuralist and post-structuralist narratologists, the value of fiction was often beside the point. Recently, narratologists have begun looking at the value of fiction. In Living to Tell About It, Jim Phelan notes that âfor almost all of us living and telling are inextricably connected: we make sense of our experiences through the stories we tell about them, even as those stories influence our future experiencesâ (ix). Not only do we use stories to understand ourselves, but we also use stories to understand others. Martha Nussbaum argues that fiction is necessary for functioning democratic societies, saying that citizens need a ânarrative imagination,â which she describes as âthe ability to think what it might be like in the shoes of another person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that personâs story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might haveâ (95â6). In other words, we need fiction to understand ourselves and to imagine others.
Imagining others is essential because, as Jakob Lothe argues, it can be the only way to understand certain aspects of history. In a discussion of Jonathan Littellâs The Kindly Ones and Kjartan Fløgstadâs Grense Jakobselv , first-person narratives by Holocaust perpetrators, Lothe notes that many involved in the Holocaust refuse to talk about their crimes, and that:
this kind of refusalâŚentails omissions and information gaps that indirectly yet forcibly suggest how fictional accounts can prove to be a great resource of Holocaust narrative. Extending the range of such narratives by enabling and even requiring perpetrators to speak, both Littell and Fløgstad present the reader with extended, detailed accounts that, though containing omissions and not necessarily frank, comprehensible, or reliable, present rich psychological portraits of the two protagonists. (104)
In other words, the only way we can hope to understand those involved is with a carefully constructed and meticulously researched fictional account, and these accounts have value because, despite the fact that they are fictional, they can lead to an understanding of the psychology of tho...