Narrative Paralysis

Let's start with the premise that most of the writing we distrust is narrative. It's fine for writers to write narrative, but it's our job to reveal their tricks and turns as if narrative was always an act of writing in bad faith, of trying to pull the wool over the reader's eyes, of trying to make us forget the frame, the metaphor, the trope, suspend our critical judgement for the pleasure of the text. Barthes taught us that pleasurable texts are nothing short of masturbation, short and sweet and solo, without the interlocution of a resistant text. Derrida taught us to distrust the word, every word, and particularly those strung together with some self-evident flow. Our continental masters and a few mistresses—narrative must always come to climax, engorge, and disgorge once its prey has been caught—have rapped their rulers across our knuckles for the desire to read easily, for plot, for story, for character, for sentiment, for pleasure, and now we wonder, why do I have to write like that? Because, I have to read like that.

We have backed ourselves into a critical corner, so suspicious of stories, be they origin, easy, national, or otherwise (though apocalyptic we readily believe) that we censure our narrative drive to the extent that those among us who ply the arts of clear prose are bound to be acting in bad faith, using the tools of the devilish logocentric to befuddle a reader here or there into actually believing or enjoying a well-wrought text. Opacity equals profundity, we all believe, the denser the better, the more convoluted, jargonistic, clever, and conceited (only in the sense of arrogance, never itself a conceit), the more we hail the work as endlessly quotable, to be elevated to the stature of self-evident truth. Narrative, we know, lies; theory, never, since its drive is always toward truth and goodness, its displeasures good medicine for our privileged souls. (Although, Teresa de Lauretis has always acknowledged that theory is itself a "passionate fiction.") Yes, only the downtrodden may write narratives. The rest of us flagellate ourselves with words that would never deign to be found in Webster's, words that gather all meaning into themselves and reference nothing since referentiality itself is nothing but smoke and mirrors.

Only people who cannot think in abstract language write narrative; narcissistic, they cannot see beyond the self, assuming it exists at all, not the same one bit as subjectivity which enters a text violently and must be rent asunder at its entry points, dissolving under the weight of the law carried in every word, in every incoherent tumescent perversion. Only people with nothing better to think about write narrative: failed academics who produce few critical works and nothing of much value, marred as it is by that voice, that voice that insists that it bears some relationship to the hand that created it, that voice, grating in its simplicity, that voice, that doesn't know enough to sneer at itself. Only people who are afraid to be judged by their peers, afraid to be marked, use narrative as a defence. How can one evaluate a narrative? Without an apparatus, a scaffolding of veracity and verification, narrative holds no value except as a primary text to be dismantled or contextualized or read microscopically for its unintended or nefarious purposes, but never for intention itself. We train our students to be so suspicious of narrative that they approach it only as a set of lies—no greater truths to be found there—to the extent that we and now they no longer trust any form of language unless it is unreadable. The more unreadable the better as we comprehend our reading practices in the face of the impenetrable, the shard effects of shattered glass rather than the smooth mirror qualities of texts that flatter us.

I too have loved these texts, these masterworks of difficult reading; I too have knelt at their alter and tried my best to reproduce their uberprose, littering my writing with slippery words that will never allow a reader to pin me down...