narrativization

A novel can be about anyone.

That's already the way it is.  We're the protagonists of our own lives, lived narratively.  And we can't not live narratively because the tendency to narrativize is hardwired into our physiological selves.  We've developed a cognitive predisposition to constructing adaptive illusions that detect – correctly and sometimes incorrectly – order because we live in society, among others, and are forced to make sense of things or else die.   In 1978, psychologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff published “Does the Chimpanzee Have a ‘Theory of Mind’?” in which they explore the concept of a theory of mind, which they define by suggesting: “A system of inferences of this kind may properly be viewed as a theory because [mental] states are not directly observable, and the system can be used to make predictions about the behavior of others” (515).  In The Belief Instinct, psychologist Jesse Bering offers a more vibrant picture of theory of mind as the cognitive capability to ascribe mental states – beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on – to other agents because their minds cannot be directly observed: “we can’t see minds, feel them, or weight hem in any literal sense; rather, we can only infer their existence through observing other actors’ behaviors” (23).  Theory of mind is a biologically hardwired mechanism that allows us to discern meaning in others’ behaviors, in naturally-occurring events, and so on.  We can attribute intentionality to agents, hypothesize about their feelings, and weave narratives that make sense of their actions.  Of course, cognitive science has also shown that theory of mind sometimes goes too far and causes us to imagine that meaning exists where in fact it may not.  For when others “violate our expectations for normalcy, or stump us with surprising behaviors, our tendency to mind-read goes into overdrive,” and we begin to hypothesize about a number of possible explanations for what happens: that people have purposes, that everything happens for a reason, that natural disasters are symbols of God’s anger, that our souls live on in an afterlife, and so on (23).  We spin absurd stories in order to satisfy our need to make sense of the world.  If we didn't tell stories, we would become extinct.  Stories are literally part of our phenomenological experience of the world.  

So of course novels can be about anyone.  That's already how we move through the world.  That's how we piece together what we perceive.  Figuring protagonists and villains and plot twists is what we do, and we can't help it.

And even if we wanted to help it, and resist our natural propensity for meaning-making (since, as Bering ominously asks: "is it wise to trust our evolved, subjective, mental intuitions to be reliable gauges of the reality outside our heads, or do we instead accept the possibility that such intuitions in fact arise through cognitive biases that--perhaps for biologically adaptive reasons--lead our thinking fundamentally away from objective reality?"), because the meanings we invent may be completely ridiculous, we shouldn't.  We should always narrativize (but responsibly) because it is through narrativization that we reflect and alter the course of our lives according to how we want our life-narrative to turn out in the end.

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every pleasure and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence . . .’”  

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche poses this scenario – called by philosophers ‘the doctrine of eternal recurrence’– as a test of the goodness of your life overall.  If you are delighted by the prospect of living your entire life again, just as you have lived it, in an eternal loop, then your life must be in accord with your values.  If, on the other hand, you despair, then your life has not passed the test.  Your objective is to pass this test.  Lanier Anderson links Nietzsche’s test to the idea of redemption.  According to Anderson, the way to pass the test is to think of your whole life as a narrative in which all lamentable events in your past can be redeemed if you reinterpret them in such a way that alters their significance within the grand scheme of your life.  The past itself cannot be changed, but by redirecting your future, you can alter the past’s import relative to your life as a whole.  This takes integrity and illusion: integrity to force you to look at your life accurately and objectively, and illusion to help you re-imagine your past in light of your present and future.  

So thinking in narratives is good.  And thinking of ourselves as the protagonists of narratives is good, and as long as good things ought to be done, we ought to each of us be the protagonist of the next great novel.