Narrative as Meaning

In North Carolinian Clyde Edgerton's work of genius, In Memory of Junior, Morgan Bales, the young son of a leading character in the tale, mocks his father's family, especially the propensity of its members to tell and re-tell stories of kith and kin. Failing to see himself as a player in that drama, he has turned to more esoteric pursuits: "What [dad] can't get into his head is this: I'm into computers. He does not see how the knowledge of operating a computer, creating applications, is like real knowledge." Later, Morgan's Uncle Grove--sensitive to the boy's blasé aloofness, tells him, "you know, whatever you leave behind is your history, and it better be good, because you're history longer than you're fact." In the end, after going through a cathartic fishing trip and a wildly improbable experience with an airplane crash and a box of snakes, Morgan finally concludes, "I'm glad I've got that story now. The snake story. It'll last me my whole life."

Wayne Meeks, in The Origins of Christian Morality, New Haven: Yale University Press (1993) makes very nearly the same point about the unique nature of Christian morality. After conceding that he has turned up "embarrassingly few examples of a clear difference [in morally sensitive areas] that could be ascribed to Christian influence," he concludes that "[it] may be that what most clearly sets forth Christian ethics apart from all other ethical discourse of late antiquity, with which it otherwise shares so much, is just the creation of this peculiar story in which each of us is called on to be a character, and from which character itself and virtue take its meaning." He says, "individuals do not become moral agents except in the relationships, the transactions, the habits and reinforcements, the special uses of language and gesture that together constitute life in community."

Walker Percy, in The Message in the Bottle, described the basic Christian belief to be that "man [was] created in the image of God with an immortal soul, that he occupied a place somewhere between the beasts and the angels, [that] he lost his way...and became a pilgrim or a seeker of his own salvation, and that the clue and sign of his salvation was to be found not in science or philosophy but in news of an actual historic event involving a people, a person, and an institution." No, we are not angels and we are not dogs, but as Percy has said, we are human beings, who know, if we know at all, "through the mirror of another."

"Alisdair MacIntyre, among philosophers, and Stanley Hauerwas, among theological ethicists, have argued that narrative is not merely a help for moral teaching--a relish to make the main dish go down easier, as Plutarch put it--but it is essential to proper moral reasoning. Moral discourse need not always be in the form of narrative, but MacIntyre and Hauerwas argue that to be coherent and successful it must be connected with narrative. To speak of virtue entails that we tell stories.

MacIntyre claims that virtue cannot exist without moral narrative, because of the 'narrative character of human life.' 'Man is,' he says, 'essentially a story-telling animal.

It is my view that telling one’s own story is an attempt to establish a world reality of oneself, that life has meaning.

If you take as a given that Shannon's first theorem of thermodynamics is correct, that is, that things tend to entropy, chaos, confusion, then you must confront what Man has done: he has made complex systems out of chaos, none the least of which is language (but also including everything from the space shuttle to a system of justice). In all of these cases, redundancy is used in these systems to make things more clear. "In nearly all forms of communication, more messages are sent than are strictly necessary to convey the information intended by the sender. Such additional message diminishes the unexpected-ness, the surprise effect, of the information itself, making it more predictable. This extra ration of predictability is called redundancy…." Campbell, 62.] In the case of language there are a number of ways in which redundancy makes things more clear. Suppose your one-year-old turns around to you and says "Ball!" Without some other clues, your do not know exactly what that means. If a ball is near, the baby may mean,"I want the ball", "get the ball for me" or it may mean, "I like the color of the ball", or "I like to see the ball bounce." Another illustration of redundancy can be seen thusly: H---, ---l, -h- g--g- -l- ---e. Some may be able to guess this without further redundancy. Some may guess the addition of the following letters: H--l, -a-l, -he g--gs a-l h--re. Some will have guessed that the phrase is "Hail, hail, the gang's all here." The additional letters making the phrase understandable is called redundancy. Additionally, many feel that grammar, syntax--i.e., sentence structure-- is a redundancy, a help in understanding communication. Thus, redundancy helps make clearer a communication from one person to another.

Having considered this, it is apparent that the human being has added redundancy to its environment, much more so than a mere organism in an environment. In fact, Walker Percy feels as if a human's Edenic state is when he or she is able to name. That is, to say that is a ball, or that is water, or that is a tree, and know what those objects actually are. When you have done this you have created a world, your world. And from there, as, again Percy puts in religious or metaphysical terms, in your world, you begin to ask why there are trees, why is there death, why is my marriage breaking up. This is the Fall from an Edenic state intro a state where everything needs to be explained and understood. Thus, an inward question is draped with the possibilities of communications, language, words, and story, narrative. This is, one can easily say, a range of possibilities open only to the human being. And, at least in this way, humans are different from other organisms in an environment. We are at least organism in an environment, but we are more. It is perhaps this more that makes the human being so peculiar.

At any rate, it can easily be deduced that a person's story, his place in the world that he has constructed, is of great importance to him--perhaps of primary importance. And it is the narrative that gives body and life to the human's search for a meaning within this world. A person's narrative, therefore, is perhaps the paramount redundancy.

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