Coherence and Comprehension
The opening section of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” can be a tough sell for students. And by a tough sell, I mean they generally find it ridiculous. To be honest, its not like their derision is unwarranted. First Palamon, then Arcite, stare out their prison window, spy Emily in the garden, and instantly fall over and start spewing histrionic declarations of their inability to live another minute without her favor. Its all a bit, shall we say, unbecoming. But it is vitally important that students do not dismiss the passions of these men out of hand at this early juncture, lest they miss the meaning behind the transformation of these passions later in the story. And this is why, once a year, I find myself in a room full of teenagers, trying to convince them about the reality of love at first sight.
What makes this is a fun exercise for me is that I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in the idea myself, which means I face the challenge of mustering arguments for a thesis I find dubious. I often employ an analogy that goes something like this: suppose two siblings receive identical presents on Christmas morning. They both begin shouting with joy, running around the living room and repeatedly declaring, “this is the best gift ever!” But over the next couple weeks, the first sibling – call him Edward - can be found playing with that toy at all hours – taking it into the bathtub, into bed, wearing it out with his endless attention. On the other hand, the other sibling – let’s call him Matthew - has thrown his toy somewhere in the back of his closet, where it lies neglected. Do these contrasting modes of behavior cause us to reassess the initial reactions of the two children?
It would seem that they do. Of Edward, we would now probably say something like, “he really loves that toy,” while on the other hand, we would say of Matthew something like, “I guess he wasn’t all that into the toy after all.” And in light of these statements about their present states of mind, we would likely go back and reassess their states of mind at the time they received their presents, likely concluding that there was something in Edward’s response to his gift that was more authentic or more abiding than Matthew’s. That is to say, it seems clear that events after Christmas morning would affect and change the way we regard the events that unfolded on Christmas morning.
Well, what comes after that moment in prison for Palamon and Arcite? Years of devotion and privation, a repeated courting of death for their beloved’s sake, and, in Palamon’s case, a pledge of life-long fidelity in marriage. Does this give us any insight into the depth of their initial reaction, risible as it might have seemed? It seems like it certainly does; it seems clear that we must look back on that reaction, in light of what we learn about the men’s devotion later in the story, and admit that there was something sincere in it after all. In fact, we can question ourselves, and ask whether the reason we dismissed that reaction at first is not because we are used to seeing such sudden infatuations slowly (or not so slowly) giving way to indifference. But notice, in both cases, we are assessing certain events in light of events which come later; we are evaluating the value of an instantaneous transport by the extent to which it does or does not motivate virtuous action.
The case is the same with Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare is at pains to emphasize the flightiness of Romeo’s affections, by introducing him at the outset as a young man melancholy over the love of Rosalind. Then, lo and behold, he spots Juliet, and Rosalind is a thing of the past. Friar Lawrence is scandalized, rightly, by the instability of his attractions, and we are clearly invited to doubt the depths of his love for Juliet, in spite of his eloquent protestations. But then, he consents to marry her, defying his family to do so, then calmly accepts insults from a Capulet, his mortal enemy, for her sake, then takes his life when he mistakenly believes she herself is dead. Call his passions unruly, call them imprudent – the one thing we cannot call them is insincere. The one thing we cannot doubt is precisely the thing we doubted when we heard him effusing back in Act One – that he truly loves Juliet.
This phenomenon, wherein certain forms of action or assertion can only be morally evaluated in light of subsequent forms of action or assertion, is not exclusive to fiction. Benedict Arnold would still stand as one of this nation’s greatest heroes, his face adorning coins and library facades, had the revolution ended immediately after Saratoga. Judas Iscariot would still hold a revered place among the twelve disciples had Christ’s mission ended sometime before his entry into Jerusalem. It is a basic fact about human lives, both in reality and in their fictional representations, that no part of those lives can be understood correctly without reference to the all the other parts. When the chorus admonishes the audience at the end of Oedipus Rex, “consider no man happy until he is dead,” they mean to say something more, I think, than that the oblivion of death is happiness in comparison to life’s suffering and mischance; they mean to say you cannot safely evaluate a portion of any life until the entirety of that life has unspooled itself. Perhaps this is the reason why it is such a moving experience to gaze at the photographs displayed at a funeral, where the momentous and mundane events in the life of the deceased are recorded. There is a real sense that only now, now that the beloved is departed, can the full import of those moments be comprehended.
What all this points to is the indispensable status of narrative structure for the interpretation of human lives. For what is basic to that structure is the dynamic I have been describing, which is to say, that in a story, every action only becomes decipherable in light of the actions that come after it. Arthur Danto called attention to this dynamic, in a work titled Narration and Knowledge, by contrasting what he called a chronicle with a true story. In a chronicle, events simply concatenate, without any kind of coherent relation, so that subsequent events provide no meaningful information about prior events. But in a story, a coherent sequence of events means that subsequent events impart the audience a power to interpret prior events more astutely and correctly. This is just what it means, for Danto, for a work to be story; this kind of coherence is the demarcative quality of narrative, its sine qua non.
Since I was a very young man, I noticed my own habit of rushing through a novel to get to the end, and the more I was captivated by a story, the greater my haste to complete it. I thought that was odd and counterintuitive. Shouldn’t one’s enjoyment of a work of literary art retard the speed with which one perceives it? Shouldn’t I have lingered even longer over each sentence, the more I found them aesthetically rewarding? But I eventually came to see that my haste was a consequence of a desire to take in the story as a whole. Even at that early age, I had an intuition that no part of what I was reading, when I was reading a story, could be properly understood until I was able to perceive the whole.
I think too that this is why I find the ancient approach to moral thought, particularly as it appears in the ethics of Aristotle, far more congenial than most modern approaches to the topic. Aristotle asks questions like, “what qualities make for a sound character and how are they developed or impeded?” or, “what are the sorts of ends pursued by a good man over the course of his life?” These are questions that bear in mind the narrative structure of a human life, and which demonstrate an awareness that the moral tenor of actions cannot be adequately comprehended apart from a grasp of the moral tenor of the life they help to constitute. On the other hand, a figure like Kant – to take a representative modern – is concerned with the quality of singular actions, of actions comprehended exclusively in the here and now, without reference to any larger biographical context. We might regard his categorial imperative as a method for evaluating the moral contours of actions in isolation from all such narrative structure. We see the legacy of this approach in the reduction of contemporary moral reasoning to debates about “trolley problem” type scenarios – moral conundrums devoid of any real narrative context.
Aristotle, by contrast, wants us to see that fruitful moral inquiry takes place at the biographical level, which implies the indispensability of a narrative framework for such inquiries. Alasdair MacIntyre provides an account – presented first in After Virtue, then elaborated in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? – of the way Aristotle appropriates his moral vocabulary from the epics of Homer, so that the very concepts at the heart of his moral schemata are ones derived from an interpretation of narrative structure. When Rembrandt painted the famous depiction of Aristotle studying the bust of Homer, he clearly meant to capture the general intellectual debt the philosopher owed to his poetic predecessor, but we perhaps can read the image as a sign of moral philosophy’s dependence on the art and study of narration.
There are dozens of significant ramifications stemming from this realization of life’s intrinsically narrative shape, but I want to jump straight to the most grandiose one of all, which is simply that human life cannot be adequately comprehended apart from narrative structure; that no person can approach human life with any semblance of wisdom who is not an adept at comprehending stories. In an age replete with non-narrative paradigms for making sense of human life – scientific, psychological, economic – I want to assert, without compromise, that no paradigm for interpreting human life is adequate but for the one provided by narrative structure, and no training sufficient to prepare a mind for fruitful meditation on human life but one rooted in the reading and study of stories.
The classical education movement has made a point of restoring the humanities to their former place at the heart of primary education, but we should always keep in mind that at the heart of the humanities is the story – stories of things true and imagined, of things glorious and ruinous. There is much our students may derive uniquely from each of these respective stories, but from their habitual study of them all we may hope they derive a basic intuition to regard all human lives – to regard especially their own lives – as stories waiting to be completed well or ill. Of all the intellectual gifts we can impart to them, this is perhaps the most crucial and beneficial of them all.