surmising narrative and meaning

Currently, my significant other and I are reading Brian Boyd's On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. I feel that I, personally, have two reasons for reading it, one being empirical interest in the subject of narrative theory--in which the book's title effectively conveys a focus and argument--and the other being putatively irrational and evaluatively, emotionally ethical interest--which, arguably, is nevertheless closer to the point of such a work. To put it more clearly, this latter interest is one of finding a coherent ethical statement with which I can agree and which stems from my felt need for a moral worldview that is persuasive and socially meaningful, yet divorced from what I think is a parochial and unfair Christian ethics.

The problem I believe inheres in Christianity is its creation of a worldview that manages to be coherent in part by being exclusive, and ordered by being archaically hierarchical. By its exclusivity, I mean Christianity adheres to a notion of abhorrent modes of sexual behavior, including homosexuality and extramarital or premarital sex, as being undermining of its socio-sexual hierarchy of community. By its being archaically hierarchical, I mean authority, and thence appropriate behavior, are arbitrarily masculinist and patriarchal--not to mention jealously theistic, although this last is another argument altogether. My basic moral sense finds any group that maintains coherence by means of an unfounded repugnance for some vilified other is not only unforgivably primitive but also itself morally repugnant.

Of course, the problem with abandoning the loving embrace of my childhood faith is a moral one that runs deeper than the problem of pain; namely, that I, like every I assume every other honest, non-sociopath human being would agree, am possessed of inherent notions of good and evil, help and harm, that on many points do agree entirely with the tenets of Christianity. I, like Maugham's protagonist Philip Carey in Of Human Bondage, find myself facing the explicit problem of rejecting a concept of deity I cannot believe in, and a worldview and system of ethics ostensibly based on that concept, with I know not what, exactly. As Maugham's book puts it, a fear of the law and punishment (Bentham, Foucault, et al.) is neither sufficient motivation nor an authority per se. Yet the reason that fear is itself insufficient brings one to Philip Carey's implicit problem: if not from God's authority, whence can a reasonable system of ethics and meaning derive?

As often happens with agnosticism and atheism, one confronted with the painful problem of seeking itself may find only one or two options for illuminating meaningfulness--no, three. First, one may attempt to install another, new authority; this, however, can lead to the paradox of infinite regress when one applies the same inquiry into that authority's source; an attempt to remain in this stage must end with either rationality's vicissitudinous and unsatisfiable hunger, or else intentional application of nepenthe. Second, one may attempt to install one's own authority in creating meaning in the world--this is Existentialism, basically--which may also succumb to inquiry's undermining desire for a foundation of authority, but offers at least the solace of autonomy. Third--and, I hope, most promising--is an attempt to find meaning and satisfaction in the natural order of the material universe.

I have said that I feel the call of emotion or irrationality is perhaps the truest or most apt reason for my perusal of Boyd's work on narrative. What I mean by this stems from my reading of Jung, as well as contemporary psychological writing; these authorities seem to have come to the conclusion that, as Jung hinted, seemingly rational, evaluative decision-making is actually an emotional process. I must reiterate a standard caution, echoing Jung and other psychological writers up until now: "emotion" in the human mind is not only those sweeping passions like joy or love or anger or hate, but also the organizing system of color-coding, so to speak, with which the brain assumptively labels each distinct impression. The import, nevertheless, is that our self-rationalizedly logical decisions are made not even necessarily by a process of heuristics but by the emotional brain itself--that unconscious source of "feelings" is also the source of decisive feeling.

It is this same unconscious or subconscious that is the source of dreams (often markedly recognizable in form and function across seeming chasms of time and culture) and of stories. As Tolstoy answered his own rhetorical question in What Is Art?, stories and other forms of narrative are at base a means for communicating, sharing, and broadcasting emotion. Our contemporary, Jungian view of decision-making tells us that these emotions are also, consciously or not, methods for persuasively bringing the artwork's audience to agreement with the artist's unconscious critical evaluation of what is and what ought to be; that is, of meaning and order, thus morality, based on an interaction with humanity's evolved sense of the world.