Rebecca Wolff Considers the Real and True
Poet, writer, and editor Rebecca Wolff writes about truth-telling and its relationship to story, to narrative, to "revitalization" of cities, and contemporary experimental fiction. This leads to autobiography and memoir, to the Donner Party in Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower. An excerpt from "Our Love of True Stories Has Destroyed Our Sense of Truth":
Stories are one very popular way we make meaning out of experience, order out of disorder, sense out of nonsense, matter out of particles, time out of mind. The poet Anne Carson blows our collective, tech-addled mind when she gently and dispassionately reminds us, in her famous beloved book-length essay Eros the Bittersweet, that before there were coded texts, and alphabets, and of course before reproduction of sound, we apprehended language only as voiced and simultaneously embodied; a story was told to us by a person, always—cells and neurons and eye contact. There was no other way. Stories lived in, emanated from, people. Bards recited epics; parents told cautionary tales. Only later did scribes craft parables; moralists squeeze out fables; fabulists marry normalcy to magic, miming back to us our human unlikelihood. Realists crafted daily nihilism.
Stories, sometimes called “narratives,” are how we grab circumstances, conditions, even histories by the neck and make them do our bidding. Cities undergoing what is called “revitalization” for tourist consumption, as is my small city in the Hudson Valley currently, hire branding agencies to help them “tell the story of their city,” the better to eat you with, my dear. They who control the narrative control the buy-in, and expert marketing execs know this full well, as does even your average human, who is encouraged to get their story straight, and then to tell it on the Ted stage or at the Moth or in a pitch on a blog for a podcast. A recent post on Insta which I thumbed past at the speed of nausea captured a millennial apparently in the midst of a particularly satisfying morning’s round of creativity with the caption “I am always telling my story.” This is not to promise delight or enchantment but rather to threaten toxic oversell, a pernicious surplus of reproduced selfhood such that I must buy you. Not I am you but I own you. This compulsive narratizing is a mutual enslavement of the captive teller who cannot afford to live her own life (to wit Uber, AirBnB, avatar) and her captive audience who cannot put their phone down.
Experimental fiction writers and poets in the late 20th century played around with this control extensively, intending to develop means for, modes of, subversion...
Read on at Lit Hub.