I have spent my entire life resisting the idea of the narrative and storytelling (which is a hard place to be in for a writer). For Keith Hamon, though, the narrative is the core. He cites Pria Anand's The Confabulations of Oliver Sacks, where a 'confabulation' is "a neurological repair where the brain fills memory gaps with stories that the teller believes to be true." Well there's no doubt there are these gaps that are filled, but are they filled with stories? Hamon thinks so. "Narrative is the biological software that converts raw, chaotic data into a liveable reality. It's an instinctive search for order that slips beneath consciousness to insure that we always have a coherent sense of ourselves and our worlds." It strikes me as wrong, though, that the only sort of coherent sense we can have is a text-based linear structure. At the very least, it's a fabric - "it's all a rich tapestry," as Andrea likes to say. And for me, at least, it's thickly woven, multi-modal, and generally non-linguistic. I can, if I really try, represent it with a narrative, but it doesn't come naturally at all. I think we do people a disservice if we tell them all they can imagine is stories.
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