“No, I definitely don’t think so. He just buys them for his friends.”
“Oh God damn it, Niklas! Why are we talking like this? Why can’t we just be honest with each other, you and me?”
“But I haven’t started smoking!”
“That’s not what I mean!”
What have I done that’s so terrible? Why are my husband and son both being taken from me like this? I feel awash in self-pity, and that makes me despise myself even more.
But I’m the adult here. Three deep breaths. No sniveling; I pull myself together.
“Niklas, I just want to tell you, I feel like you’ve done a remarkable job of dealing with your father’s illness.”
“Really?” Why does he already look so bored and dismissive?
“Yes, you have. But there’s no call for you to be brave all the time. It’s all right for you to have feelings too, just like—”
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean, you’re human too, and even though you probably have a great time with Emilie, I’m sure you also must be affected by …”
I hate myself as I speak, I sound like such a cliché. It feels as if it’s not just him, but also me who’s being crushed and suffocated by all this water. I can’t tell where Niklas is right now, but I’m deep inside his photographs, I’m sinking, gasping for air, drowning.
Storytelling’s Crutch Is Broken
Signe Riis Gormsen
Twentieth-century narratives have become inextricably intertwined with psychoanalysis in their use of structure, characterization, and symbol. Meanwhile, psychiatric research in recent years has exposed psychoanalysis as an unscientific superstition on a level with astrology and numerology.
If the art of narrative in literature, TV, and film does not develop the strength to stand on its own feet without leaning on psychoanalysis, storytelling will be doomed to play a role in our time like that of a dictatorship’s doddering old head of state: a decidedly antimodern force that must be circumvented or killed if any form of real cultural development is to take place.
One essential characteristic of the well-told tale is that elements introduced along the way in the story subsequently turn out to have been introduced with a purpose.
Every reader has an intuitive narratological feeling that she obtained from fairy tales, among other things, which enables even a child to distinguish a sequence of random events from a “telling.”
I’m reading “Silly Hans,” the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, to my 7-year-old nephew, who has never heard the story before. I read about Silly Hans’s two brothers riding to the king’s castle on horseback to propose to the princess, while Silly Hans rides a goat. I ask my nephew if he thinks the story is over yet.
No.
I read to him how on the way to the castle, Silly Hans finds first a dead crow, then a wooden shoe, and at last some mud, all of which he takes with him. Is the story over yet?
No.
I read how the princess at the castle says that it is hot because the king is roasting chickens. “Then I should be able to roast this crow,” Silly Hans says and pulls out the crow. The princess tells him she has nothing to roast it in. “But I do,” says Silly Hans, pulling out the wooden shoe. The princess says that she doesn’t have any sauce. “I’ve got so much sauce that I can spill some of it,” says Silly Hans, and he pulls some mud up out of his pocket.
“I like that!” says the princess, and so they get married.
Is the story over now?
Yes. Now it’s over.
A series of random events doesn’t become a story until the events have been shaped into a meaningful pattern and the narrative’s various threads have finally been braided into a rope. This sense of elementary narrative structure resides so deep in us that even a 7-year-old can distinguish a story from a recitation of personal descriptions and actions.
Let us turn now to the twentieth century’s fairy tale for grown-ups: the psychological novel. Let us imagine an ideal type of this novel, a hodgepodge of the hundreds of thousands of psychological novels published in the Western world during the past century.
A man lives in the small port town where his father worked by the harbor and his mother died from her job in the glassworks. He beats his children. The man’s oldest son grows big enough to confront him about the violence in their home, and the reader follows the man on a journey back to his childhood. The harbor and the threatening dark water take on a symbolic cast, and the man relives the traumas that continue to plague him — the death of his beloved mother and his own father’s violence, which he is involuntarily repeating. He encounters resistance on this journey of realization, and this resistance makes him even more aggressive. But he also experiences inspirational turning points that alter his understanding of himself. By the end of the book, he has recognized the overall pattern of his life. This recognition is sufficient to transform him; at last the violence can cease, and he is liberated.1
Regardless of how clichéd this plot may be, it is clearly a coherent narrative and not a chance collection of people and events. As readers, we feel that we get to know new aspects of the characters. We take an active interest in the turning points of their lives and follow along as, by degrees, their self-knowledge develops. The story has an abundance of symbols connected to the traumas as well as their resolution, and readers can feel themselves heartened and enriched in reading the novel by the profound insight they acquire into their fellow human beings.
The author doesn’t even need to be particularly skillful in her understanding of structure or composition, as the psychoanalytical worldview automatically structures episodes that would otherwise appear disjointed and unresolved. It makes them into a story.
Everything contributes structurally to this story. There is only one problem, albeit a major one: The novel is one great big lie! It confirms for the reader an antiquated view of humanity that psychiatrists (and others who have advanced degrees in the human psyche) have long since abandoned. That means that the novel can be considered an indifferent diversion at best, and at worst a patent stultification.
Let us imagine instead another novel.
A man who lives in a small port town beats his children. Many things happen, there are feelings and vivid sensations and dramatic scenes — but none of them lead anywhere. The man tries to understand his own life, but regardless of what he realizes, it doesn’t change anything. Several events intrude without direction or purpose. Then one day his doctor prescribes him some antidepressant pills. After that, he no longer hits his children so often.
This cannot be called a story. Everything dissolves into meaningless fragments without consequences, into a bald recitation of facts. This novel undermines the very structure of narrative.
The problem here is that this novel comes much closer to the unmerciful randomness, the immense chaos, and the constant biological vulnerability that constitute the essence of human existence. In short, this “anti-narrative” is more truthful.
The great majority of novelists and people who write for film and TV have never attended lectures about the breakthroughs in the last 30 years of psychology, psychiatry, and neurology. On the other hand, in the course of their high school or university education, pretty much all of them learned about psychoanalysis — which happens to provide the perfect structure for storytelling that is otherwise structurally unreflective.