Master Narrative 1 comments

OVER the years, my wife and I have tried to make a point of reading aloud to our children at bedtime. As anyone who has done this will tell you, children constitute an audience that is, more often than not, acutely sensitive to nuance and detail, and utterly exacting when it comes to narrative coherence. This has become especially evident to me on those occasions when I have attempted (with a rather naive foolhardiness) to spin out a series of original stories for my kids. For all the hype about computers providing children with "interactive" learning experiences, there is nothing like telling a child a story for interactivity. My kids are polite enough to raise their hands when they have some penetrating question to ask about plot, character, or setting, but I know that my imagination is flagging when their hands shoot up with every other sentence. If I leave something out of the story, or commit the sin of inconsistency, these fierce critics won't let me proceed until I've revised the narrative. Oddly enough, they never attempt to take over the storytelling. They are convinced that I have the authority to tell the tale, but they insist that I live up to the complete story that they know exists somewhere inside me. It's enough to give me a serious case of performance anxiety.

When children fall (as they must) from innocence into the ambiguous world of adulthood, they often lose their intense attachment to literary and religious narratives as guiding principles in their lives. Full of their newfound physical and mental powers, young adults begin to think that they are writing their own scripts. But there comes the time which Dante described as the "dark wood," mid-way along our path in life, when we realize that we have lost a sense of the story of our lives. In The Divine Comedy Dante the pilgrim-poet recovers the story that began with the vision of a beautiful girl named Beatrice; that personal and particular story, rooted in time and place, becomes joined with the cosmic narrative of salvation.

According to postmodern intellectuals, the West is no longer undergirded by the Judeo-Christian story that had guided it—and its great artists, like Dante—for nearly two millennia. These same theorists argue that the modern "master narratives" of Marx and Freud—the secular replacements for the Judeo-Christian story—have also lost their capacity to give meaning to our lives.

This "storyless" moment is welcomed by the postmodernists because they believe that any master narrative is totalitarian. As Robert Royal has written in The New Religious Humanists: A Reader (Free Press), "The postmodern strategy usually denies—`master narratives' in favor of petites histoires, that is, personal stories as the only locus of rich meaning open to us. In this view, all the old grands recits—are dangerous totalizing and potentially terroristic illusions."

Any casual survey of the arts today would reveal that our novels, films, and paintings are geared almost exclusively toward the petites histoires rather than the grands recits. Where can one find artists now who have the aesthetic ambitions of an Eliot, a Joyce, or a Pound? The majority of postmodern artists believed that in abandoning the master narrative of faith, they would be free to tell the personal stories that reveal the unvarnished truth. When postmodern art refers to the old master narratives, those references are ironic and detached, like inscriptions from an ancient temple whose deity has been long since forgotten.

The question arises: how satisfied are we with the petites histoires? Have these small canvases provided us with the meaning and order to bring about a saner, more humane society? Or could it be that these works of art bear an unsettling resemblance to our divided social fabric: lonely, alienated fragments that have seemingly given up the search for a meaningful relationship to the whole?

The resurgence of interest in traditional religion that has manifested itself in various ways in our culture would seem to indicate a desire to recover the great master narrative of the West. The problem is that many people are trying to appropriate individual chapters of that story—from angels and saints to the Book of Genesis to Gregorian chant—rather than to hear the unabridged version.

Of course, literature and art at their best can forge profound imaginative links between the petites histoires and the grands recits, between the story of the individual soul's pilgrimage and the divine comedy.

There is one great advantage to the faith that the late Walker Percy called "the Jewish-Christian thing," and it is simply this: the story is not over. While we know that the story has a comedic ending (in the sense of Dante's commedia), neither our individual nor our collective destinies are predetermined. We are charged with the responsibility of renewing the story, and finding our own connections to it. When the Church's versions of the master narrative become too narrow and triumphalistic, we are called upon to expand the story so that it is more inclusive and humble. When secularism and relativism threaten to empty the faith of content and contour, we must evoke the moral and spiritual boundaries that can guide us through troubled times.

But this process of revision can only take place if we are committed to telling and retelling the whole story, not just the bits we think are relevant or fulfilling. Children have an instinctive aversion to leaving anything out of a story. Indeed, it is children's passionate belief in the existence of a master narrative that makes them the heirs of the kingdom.