HomeAugust 21, 1997
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I forget the reasons Sister M. Eudes, C.S.J. told us it was wrong to write because you had something to say. Somehow, writing was supposed to come from some deep need to overhear the words talking to each other or to craft something using words as the raw material, but not to say something. Say what? All those memoir writers, novelists, short story writers who started to write because you had something to say, please turn in your pens now and let those with purer motives take over the burden of providing a narrative for 21st century. Actually, the 21st century will be the first non-narrative century. Events will happen in no particular order with no particular connection to any other events. Nothing will ever build to a denouement or a climax except ... well you know... Anyway, in the 21st century there will be no stories, only images, fragments of images, sound bites, parallel lives that never intersect, realities far richer than the real reality by virtue of their virtuality. We are on the eve of the millennium, the future is now. Yet can we taste virtual raspberries? Can we smell the virtual sea? Can we feel the virtual wind change? If you could be a Tamagotchi, would you? Do Tamagotchis think? If so do they believe their human masters are gods? Their lives have a beginning, middle, and end. They develop and grow. So even virtual pets have narratives. Why are we as a society so fixated on getting rid of narrative? Does narrative imply an end? Does an end to the story imply death? Deconstruct your postpostmodern virtuality all you want, you will still die. In the hypertext of your life, there's still no way to avoid the ending. You can click on link after link to escape to other stories that are equally narrativeless but eventually, the machine runs out of memory. The spin through images and sound bites of parallel lives comes crashing down. You can't eat virtual cod. And so it rains. Not the torrential rains of which we've been warned but the cold steady rain of a good old fashioned rainy day back in the Eisenhower administration when we toasted to the President with chocolate milk and ate Campbell's soup for lunch. The Campbell kids were fatter then and rosy cheeked. Soup and sandwich and glass of milk snug in our warm suburban houses with our minds only dimly aware of the threat of a mushroom cloud hanging over us and would there be Campbell's soup in the fallout shelter and how long would it last? It rains acid rain not nuclear rain. The wind picks up. The promised gale may yet blow through. Yes, the 21st century will be narrativeless. We can find nothing to say. |
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