Intelligibility and Transcendence in Narrative

Midway through Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, the melancholy Colonel Brandon is struggling to give an account of the rakish Willoughby to Elinor Dashwood. “To be brief,” he begins, “when I quitted Barton last October,—but this will give you no idea—I must go farther back. You will find me,” he adds, “a very awkward narrator, Miss Dashwood; I hardly know where to begin.”¹ In this scene, Colonel Brandon’s problem is clear: he hopes to capture the “idea” of his object (Willoughby’s character), but is uncertain how much he ought to say, how he can best organize the material, and where he should begin. As Aristotle would say, he wants to bring the matter before his audience’s eyes,² and yet he is also afraid of oversimplifying. To feel this difficulty, as Brandon does in his own modest, drawing-room sort of way, is to feel the fundamental challenge of narrative in the modern West: how to make one’s object intelligible, while nevertheless doing justice to its ineffability. The human situations we read and write about are, like the story of Willoughby, at once comprehensible (indeed, begging for comprehension) and prohibitively difficult to explain or understand. And yet, this is not simply a problem we face, but a problem we expect. If a narrative, be it novel, poem, history, or what have you, does not present both intelligibility and transcendence at once, we are disappointed: the story fails to persuade, is not realistic enough. Not only Sense and Sensibility, but also Keats’s odes, Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, and The Waste Land, succeed by standing before us in their clarity, yet escaping us at the same time. But how did we come to such a position? The answer is not obvious and is all the more difficult for those who have forgotten the religious roots of our self-understanding. I want to argue that the basic tension we expect to find in a good narrative ultimately reflects the tension between our classical and Christian inheritances, inheritances we sometimes forget we have received.

Now, the ideal of intelligibility we owe particularly to the classical vision of narrative, which finds its fullest expression in Aristotle’s Poetics, though it is certainly intimated elsewhere.³ According to Aristotle, humans are basically imitative animals, and when we compose poetry, or narrative,⁴ we are trying to imitate action, and particularly human action.⁵ The imitation, or mimesis, of an action, will be most successful when it is adequately unified, the parts relating intelligibly within the whole. Memorably, Aristotle compares the parts of a drama—characters, speeches, music, and so on—to the parts of an animal, drawn together and given unity by the overall form of the creature. Just so, the drama’s parts receive their organic unity from the story, or muthos, which is the soul or form of the work.⁶ That story, in turn, centers upon a unified, intelligible action. If the action is smooth and unitary, the story will work, organizing the parts within itself. The whole will make sense; it will be compelling.

But what makes human action intelligible? In chapter 15 of the Poetics, Aristotle holds that a good character (êthos) must be consistent (homalon) from scene to scene, with one state of character following from another, and choice making sense in terms of who the person is.⁷ This consistency between past and present character, character and choice, is so important because, as Aristotle makes clear in the Nicomachean Ethics, êthos is a relatively stable, predictable state of being. A kind of “second nature,” it comes into existence by virtue of habit⁸: a person is such and such a character because he or she was habituated in particular ways by family, community, education. Past formation determines present personality. And personality, or character, is important because it determines choice: we tend to make certain kinds of choices because of who we are, which is to say, who we have been formed to be, ethically.⁹ Thus, in the life of êthos, past determines...