The Human Story

Stories are theological. And because they are theological, they are also anthropological. They tell us about God—or the gods—and they tell us about ourselves. Human beings could not do otherwise than tell stories to one another, about one another. And the impulse to narrate immediately invokes beginnings, middles and ends, and makes any number of implicit and explicit assumptions about how these come to pass. What kind of creature is the human creature? And what kind of universe does it inhabit—is it purposeful, chaotic, or locked in by unyielding fate? What meaning can we then ascribe to human actions? Different kinds of stories give us different answers to these questions.

The Sense of an Ending 1

The English novelist Julian Barnes’s 2011 novel The Sense of an Ending is the brief narrative of Tony Webster, a very average middle-class protagonist in his sixties at the time of the story. The narrative concerns Webster’s memories of his friend Adrian’s suicide some forty years prior. As the book opens, we find him musing:

We live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.

The unfolding of the details of the story supports this reflection. Webster is shown a letter that he had written Adrian and is shocked at his own viciousness, coming as it did from his jealousy that Adrian had taken up with his ex-girlfriend, Veronica. In the letter, he advised Adrian to speak to Veronica’s mother Sarah, with whom he had had a rather odd but inconsequential conversation. What Webster doesn’t realise is that his letter drove Adrian into Sarah’s arms, and that Sarah had become pregnant. This was the secret that had prompted Adrian’s suicide, and for which he, Webster, bears a degree of responsibility. Although, since the successive revelations in the novel have rendered him uncertain of his own grasp of the past he himself experienced, we the readers wonder if the truth has indeed been fully disclosed to him. Webster concludes the novel with this wistful paragraph:

There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest. 

Though the novel won the Man Booker Prize for 2011, the reader is surprised by this damp squib of an ending. The great revelation of the narrative is mildly disquieting, but it is not shocking or particularly dramatic. But perhaps this is Barnes’s point: his narrative is not particularly satisfying or conclusive, and we have learnt not to trust his narrator much, since he now can’t even trust his own powers of memory. The “sense of ending” is held before us as a kind of eschatology, but then withdrawn in anticlimax. There is not a sense of ending so much as a sense of unrest—the aesthetic effect demonstrating the point being made.

And what is that point? That time, plodding on from moment to moment, is the inescapable environment of human existence, but that it is also unfathomable from within it. Barnes surely echoes Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes 3:11), who observes (somewhat more theologically):

He [God] has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

Time invites us to think of beginnings and endings. We have the habit of thinking in narrative terms about human existence, because what else can we do? And yet these narrations prove elusive. Stories find their meaning in endings, but only one ending in human experience has any finality: individual death. Every other “ending” is at best a temporary pause, before events move on, and cast their shadow backwards over the meaning of the past. What is left for us? Suicide? Would that be a form of rest for Webster? Time’s invitation to think of ourselves as storied beings seems to be exposed as a confidence trick.

It is worth noting at this juncture that Barnes chooses to make this point via narrative, the very medium whose artifice seems in question. The unreliable narration of Webster is as much an artifice as the omniscient narrator of Middlemarch. The weaving together of plot, character and literary style won the applause of the Man Booker judges, after all. In order to make a meaningful point about our poor understanding of time’s passing, Barnes offers a comprehensible, if tepid, story within the bounds of time. 

The Sense of an Ending 2

Barnes’s novel deliberately echoes, in title and in theme, the English literary critic Frank Kermode’s 1967 book The Sense of an Ending. Here is Kermode’s version of Webster’s musing on the clock:

The clock’s “tick-tock” I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organisation which humanises time by giving it a form; and the interval between “tock” and “tick” represents purely successive, disorganised time of the sort we need to humanise.

The “tick” and the “tock” are a metaphor for the way stories organise time for us. They make an interval between beginning and end, a “middle”, into which we are always being thrust. The upswing of the “tick” (or the “once upon a time”) anticipates the downswing of the “tock” (“happily ever after”). But “all such plotting presupposes and requires that an end will bestow upon the whole duration and meaning”. The end is determinative for the whole.

This is not simply a matter of technique for the story-teller. If we are trying to figure out what kind of story the human story is, then we inevitably ask what kind of “tock” the “tick” far behind us anticipates. And thus we have developed in human culture various explanatory narratives:

At some very low level, we all share certain fictions about time, and they testify to the continuity of what is called human nature, however conscious some, as against others, may become of the fictive quality of these fictions.

We have an awareness that we inhabit “the middest”—an intermediary place in between some beginning and some end. Our desire to develop a meaningful form for this place is voracious:

Men in the middest make considerable imaginative investments in coherent patterns which, by the provision of an end, make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle.

Kermode observes that religious, mythological or aesthetic story-tellers tend to locate the present time as close to a looming end, which accounts for contemporary crisis and chaos. We (the human race, or the tribe or nation) are placed in “extraordinary relation” to the coming end, which demands of us immediate and dramatic action. But this cosmic and collective sense of the ending is also something that is addressed to the individual. And perhaps the narratives that speak on the grandest scale of apocalyptic events are really only projections of the personal crisis that faces each human being. For the inescapable reality is that the individual human being lives in the “middest” between the “tick” of birth and the “tock” of death; and:

our sense of, or need for, an ending transforms our lives “between the tick of birth and the tock of death”, and stories simulate this transformation.

The human imagination, in other words, is always trying to find consonance and pattern in the interval between birth and death, a pattern that will give guidance and purpose. And so it creates “fictions”—Kermode is definite that these constructions do not actually correspond to reality.

Kermode’s analysis, somewhat wistful in its scepticism, threatens to remove that comfort and transformative power by describing it, in the same way that exposing a medicine as a placebo empties it of its power to heal. Nevertheless, as with Barnes’s ponderous narrator Webster, the difficulty and complexity of narration does not mean narration is pointless. The human experience inexorably invites us to narrate. The “tick-tock” of the clock is a human measurement of time, but its artificiality does not mean that there is no such thing as this experience of upswing and downswing. Telling stories in the “middest” is always incomplete, frustrating and repetitive, and always involves folding back on events to rethink them as further events progress, or as more information comes to light.

On the other hand, we should also say that the story-telling impulse has, for all its frustration, produced some of the greatest moments of insight and reflection on the human condition in all of human history. It is almost banal to say so. The forming of the great story types has pressed hard the question of human meaning, identity and purpose, galvanizsing individuals and groups for action in the meantime.

Are Stories False Comfort?
1: David Shields

Kermode’s scepticism towards stories has been reiterated by the US literary critic David Shields in his very strange book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010). Shields’s argument is that human beings have a hunger for reality and that the traditional forms of literature, like the novel, which frame things in narrative form, are failing to meet this need. Shields bemoans what he calls the “artiness” of narrative. As he says: “The origin of the novel lies in its pretense of actuality.” And that pretence is no longer convincing, claims Shields. It is too slow and obviously formulaic, too processed. The truth is more complicated now. In the twenty-first century we are constantly being bombarded by raw pieces of reality, from which the truth must be constructed. Pride and Prejudice has been exchanged for The Kardashians. The tale of Bruce Jenner becoming Caitlyn Jenner is simply more fascinating than a novel, and, though it was as stagey a piece of theatre as anything on Broadway, we experienced it as part of a morass of commentary, tweets, satirical clips, magazine images; and in the end, we have had to construct the truth about it for ourselves.

Shields knows that this is a claim with theological consequences. As he says:

So: no more masters, no more masterpieces. What I want (instead of God the novelist) is self-portrait in a convex mirror.

Traditional story-telling is a hangover, says Shields, of belief in God. Ultimately, the only still point in the swirling world is me, the self, the I. The self is the only thing in which one can trust. Elsewhere he writes:

for many people in the post-transcendent twenty-first century, death is not a passageway to eternity but a brute biological fact. We’re done. It’s over. All the gods have gone to sleep or are simply moribund. We’re a bag of bones. All the myths are empty. The only bravery consists of diving into the wreck, dancing/grieving in the abyss.

Are the stories we make about our lives simply a record of our experiences and impressions at the time we open our mouths to tell the story, and no more? It is one thing to critique a story—the self-congratulatory stories of triumphant nationalism, for example. That we can tell the same story from another point of view is one of the great things about the telling of stories. But to say that the artificiality of narrative, plot and character makes the whole process an exercise in colossal self-deceit is quite another thing. How would we know? If the only faith I can have is in myself, then how can I even have faith in myself?

Shields is right to point to the way in which our story-telling always contains a mix of fact and fiction, and to the way in which we forget things, and to the way in which we tidy up reality by telling stories, and the fact that there is always the possibility of another story. He is right to say that human story-telling invokes God, or the gods, even when that is not acknowledged. But the inability to tell the whole story does not mean that there is not a whole story to be told. Our inability to have a God’s eye perspective doesn’t mean there isn’t a God’s-eye perspective. Human beings always tell stories from within the middle of a story—we cannot see to the end of things. Our story-telling is provisional, always open to correction. But our hunger for coherence and completeness suggests that we inhabit a world which will make sense and which will be completed.

Are Stories False Comfort?
2: James Wood

For the English literary critic James Wood, on the other hand, the artifice of deliberately fictional narratives is what frees us from religion. Where Shields despises narrative for its pretence of similitude, Woods claims that this is its greatest strength. He would agree that we are (in my crude term) “doing theology” when we tell stories. But in fictional story-telling, the severance of the connection between the “real” world and the world of the story is not a secret. Fictional stories invite us to imagine the world “as if” they were true. They do not assert that they are. In The Broken Estate (2000) Wood writes:

This is surely the true secularism of fiction—why, despite its being a kind of magic, it is actually the enemy of superstition, the slayer of religions, the scrutineer of falsity. Fiction moves in the shadow of doubt, knows itself to be a true lie, knows that at any moment it might fail to make its case.

This deliberate and knowing game of falsehood actually allows for the freedom of the reader to consider, evaluate and analyse the claims of the constructed world:

Fiction asks us to judge its reality; religion asserts its reality. And this is all a way of saying that fiction is a special realm of freedom.

Christian Scripture records a world that it purports is the real world of historical events. Even allowing for a gap between the events and the literary artifice needed to describe them, there is still a connection asserted. Turning Scripture into fiction (as the French writer Ernest Renan did) is deeply problematic, as Wood points out. If Christianity is really a set of moral or spiritual tales, then we could easily find a more compelling set of stories. And these would-be stories persuade us, if they do, by their internal logic and beauty rather than by their correspondence to events that are supposed to have actually happened. Epic, tragedy and comedy do make theological claims and discuss theological matters, but the reader is given a freedom that is not given to the religious adherent. A twenty-first-century reader can read The Iliad and be enthralled by it, even personally shaped by it, without having to believe that anything it says is historically or metaphysically true.

Wood’s thesis is that, sometime in the nineteenth century, the novel took over from Christianity, just as at the same time the theologians were embracing the higher criticism and re-writing the Gospels as if they were a novel. In the novel, we can see many of the great theological issues being explored and discussed, but with a freedom not previously permitted. In The Nearest Thing to Life (2015) Wood notes:

A struggle is often going on in a novel, between present and past, instance and form, free will and determinism, secular expansion and religious contraction. This is why the role of authorial omniscience has such a fraught history: the anxiety is partly a theological one and has the unresolved nature of a theological argument.

It isn’t, as we shall see, as if the novel is the first narrative form in which these matters are raised. The story-telling impulse brings them to the fore wherever it arises, and in whatever form.

What might be said in response to Wood? Does narrative art offer a superior alternative to religion, preferable because of its invitation not to faith but to conversation? Wood’s preference for fictional narrative on account of the freedom it allows sells fictional narrative short, rhetorically speaking. The reader that Wood imagines is always the critic, always aloof, never seduced by the power of the fictional world created by the author. But aren’t narratives successful as art forms precisely because they are seductive and compelling? They work because readers so easily forget that they are fiction and imagine that they do portray something “real”. This mimetic effect may not be that they claim to be an account of historical events (though they may purport to be that). What has occurred in the rise of literary fiction is not the banishment of religion but the replacement of one form of religion with another.

The Abrahamic faiths root themselves in a linear history; but the more mythic religions do not. Religious stories have long been taken as illustrative of universal rather than particular truths. Narratives, as I will show, make implicit claims about humankind in its relation to what transcends it. What is more, it is narratives as they participate in the class of narratives to which they belong that do this: genre, that is to say. Each new novel is not a discreet invitation to a consideration of how humanity is to be imagined. It is part of a piece of theological (if not religious) thinking, which makes truth claims about the world that are no less an assertion than a religion makes. Novels, like other narratives, do not start religions but they do present theologies. One novelist at least—L. Ron Hubbard—has started a religion (of a kind): the “Church” of Scientology.

Or, we may say, the Christian story, with its embeddedness in historical event, no less invites judgment than the fictional narrative. The New Testament motif of “witness”, most evident in John’s Gospel, posits the message of Jesus Christ as a case made in a court, with testimony and counter-testimony, and an appeal to the reader to believe that Jesus is the Christ on the basis of the witnesses brought forward and cross-examined. It is far from merely “asserted”.

The Christian story is presented in the New Testament as a piece of persuasion. It is rhetorical, and in taking this rhetorical stance it allows that it may not be true or accepted as convincing. The appeal to historical reality (see Luke 1:1–4) is a part of the persuasion. This appeal to the sweat and blood of events that happened became an embarrassment to scholarship in the eighteenth century, as they attempted to look through rather than at the New Testament. The narrative craft of the New Testament was not held to be a clear lens through which one might see what really happened, but rather an opaque glass through which could be seen only shadowy figures at best. What resulted from the scepticism was, ironically, the creation of a mountain of myths, with each scholarly theory becoming more daring than the last.

In the end, as Albert Schweitzer noted in The Quest for the Historical Jesus, the New Testament had become neither window nor blurry glass, but merely a mirror in which the scholar saw his own self reflected. The gospels had been dismembered, to be viewed as badly composed cubist collages. This process descended into high farce with the coming of the Jesus Seminar and their coloured beads in the latter part of the twentieth century, where the one thing that the ultra-sceptics were not sceptical of was their own theories—of which they were gullibly confident, seemingly unaware of the minuscule shelf-life of academic theories. Sceptical Biblical scholarship itself become the subject of sceptical scholarly analysis. The critical pose is not at all disinterested.

This is not the place for a wholesale analysis and critique of the New Testament scholarship of the past two centuries, nor a defence of the historicity of the gospels. Suffice it to say that what had been lost from view was the narrative wholeness of the gospels, and the narrative unity of the Bible itself. Ancient peoples clearly found a compelling totality in these documents. They found the intertextual conversation between them convincing as a narration of who they were. The early church, via Irenaeus of Lyons and others, decisively rejected Gnosticism and Marcionitism, both of which would have made Christianity ahistorical and mythical. This was a conscious and intellectually thought-through decision. The alternatives were known to them.

The development of Christian orthodoxy, then, was the development of an awareness that the founding documents of Christianity were not universal myths but highly particular stories that depended for their persuasive power on their appeal to historical events—and the “sense of an ending” that these events implied. The apostle Paul had been prepared to put this claim on the line (1 Corinthians 15): if the resurrection is merely myth and not in some sense an event, then Christian faith is lost entire. The Apostle’s Creed contains that strange reference to Pontius Pilate as a way of rooting it as a statement in the realm of event rather than simply myth.

But this reference to the resurrection prompts another line of thought. The New Testament is not simply about historical events. It is also eschatological—as Kermode recognises. It purports to describe not just a past but a future. What could be more provisional, more risky, more open to disproof than that? The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the lynchpin: a past event which is declared to be an intrusion of the future into time. Did it happen? Will it happen? These are questions on which the Christian story stands or falls.

Michael P. Jensen is the rector of St Mark’s Anglican Church, Darling Point, and teaches theology at the Sydney College of Divinity. This is an edited extract from his new book, Theological Anthropology and the Great Literary Genres: Understanding the Human Story(Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019).