Human beings love listening to stories. In fact, one of the first things you’d get in any book on the short story is the fact that humans are wired in such a way that the narrative, descriptive part appeals to them whereby they possibly try to find some kind of an identification with real life. Even the cavemen used to tell each other stories sitting cheek-by-jowl around a leaping fire inside a solitary dark cave on a storm-tossed cold night. Their creative efforts bore abundant literary fruit in the form of cave paintings and sculptures through which posterity learnt to cultivate the important civilized habit of restoring, and seeking truths about, the past.
NIRMALYA DEB
The story is a fixed narrative set in a particular timeframe but there are perplexing questions as to its very origin in the human mind and fixed structure of the narrative which reorients time and space in novel ways so as to rearrange a piece of human experience that is itself psychologically revealing and having a rational, self-conscious connection with real life. This dialectic in the realm of consciousness between reality on the one hand and literary form on the other is a real psychological tussle the artist has to face. But the literary form is itself a product of human labour; it could be an abstract object in itself like a printing machine but the concrete labour expended to produce it has to be accounted for in any rational discourse of human habits and creative instincts as well as the civilized duty man has to perform, i.e. of historically identifying the value of human literary forms that are products of particular historical ages and thereby framing conclusions and drawing evidence about the nature and forms of human discourse, which also includes thought, that reflect the nature and tendency of particular historical timeframes being considered.
This historical consciousness as well as the consciousness of the need and veracity of the human effort of creating abstract forms, which includes literary forms, is ingrained in the artist who is likewise convinced of the human potential and historical need of creating and recreating forms of real discourse to invent and reinvent himself thereby inventing and reinventing reality at the same time. A definition of the story which doesn’t take into account this role and consciousness of the artist who is directly dealing with reality and existence will be apt to be unfounded and, therefore, to be safely discarded.
Having positioned the artist as a historical being eager to a) know history, b) to interpret it, and c) to find truths of the self and its existential condition of real social life from events of the past and from thereon try to frame rules or laws of continuity that govern human behaviour and action, it is essential for the artist, first of all, to analyze his role with regard to the given material of experience as well as the physical, intellectual product he is creating that would stand in a direct relation to reality. Without having real and substantive relations to the world of matter the artist cannot be in a position to re-sequence matter in the way that literary activity demands.
Now, a story because it satisfies an elemental human need to see man and others like him – the entire race and culture – in contexts often physically, socially, or morally quite similar to his own present one, the artist has to select a particular, often past, timeframe. Why is the question of timeframe important? Only because, as Aristotle noted pretty early in the history of literary criticism, there needs necessarily be a rational, structural limitation of action for judgment about action to take proper shape. This structural limitation obviously influences the choice of language on which judgment of a literary text or a performance relies directly. But there is one philosophical confusion the artist needs to be aware of: the “present” as we understand the term in everyday usage suffices for a great majority of the human race, but the definition of the term is pretty hard to provide. If the “present” means the present moment, then there is no present moment because even as you utter that there is a present moment that moment slips into the past. The “present” stretches to an infinity to the future from the present moment but that is the segment we ascribe as future, which obviously we believe is an infinite set of events and worldly affairs. But the past has a termination in the present moment, so is the past infinite or finite? This is a problem that has baffled philosophers since antiquity because if the past is finite then our knowledge of it should be well-rounded and self-explanatory, which historical knowledge baffled by scientific doubts and problems of interpretation certainly is not. Of course, science has conclusively proved that the past, being finite, is infinite too since it is infinitely divisible spatially and temporally, but this is a relatively recent logical discovery. However, the philosophical problem as to why a finite set of objects, like say the past, ought always to be well-rounded knowledge persists.
Historical knowledge is empirical and the process of its discovery of facts and interpretation is similar to scientific methodology, the only difference being the realms of discourse (discourse being the realm of a specific form of intellectual and mental labour) are different in the cases of the two disciplines. The natural sciences study the processes of nature existing independently of man as well as the reactions of man’s involvement in natural processes. Historical studies are aimed at judgment of past human action and interpretation of events that have a distinct chronology and inner classification. The human involvement in the historical method is a vital knowledge for the artist because the historical method being basically empirical and interpretative objectifies the past all the while recognizing the vital subjective element in history, i.e. human praxis.
So the objective assessment of subjective history is a method which historical literature employs. Likewise, the artist rewires experience and recreates or objectifies reality – so both history and literature produces and reproduces experiences in different timeframes. In a word, they produce and reproduce objective reality imbued with subjective time-specific interpretation. So the artist subjectifies a part of experience which is objective already containing the subjective and endows it with order and cohesion.
A story, therefore, appeals as a subjective reordering of humanity. Take Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, for instance. Our different reactions to the novel are varied and we easily identify with the different situations of the narrative, although we don’t bestow our sympathies wholly on the narrative voice. We are critical of his melodramatic discovery of the real love of his life as well as the realization of his immature infatuation that cast so dark a spell on his moral life, yet we recognize the frailties of human nature. The socio-political world of the work is painted in language and the characters and events reflect mid-Victorian England in all its nitty-gritty – we see a society ridden with economic inequality, squalor, poverty, deceit, cunning and treachery and moral degeneration. We also see examples of moral forthrightness, human struggle and the effort to live the life of dignity, the emotional turmoil of changed circumstances and crumbling personal relationships. The value of the work, therefore, should be judged by its moral creativity – ability to create a social universe infused with human, moral insights.
Reordering of action is itself interpretation of the self and experience. This is a knowledge that enables the artist to contribute to social discourse.