W
e tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience." -- Joan Didion (emphasis mine)
I don't think this makes as much sense as people think it does.
It is true that we rely on telling stories to make sense of things. But this passage seems to be saying that there is in actual fact no sense to things -- all story is "imposition" on "disparate images", "shifting phantasmagoria".
While multiple stories about the same "thing" may be true, or share in truth, some stories are wrong. The fact that sometimes our stories are wrong does not mean that the narratives we build have nothing to do with reality. Stories are about cause and effect. If our narratives had nothing to do with reality, then we would have zero ability to predict the future. But we do, in fact, predict the future, often extremely accurately, all the time. The only way we are able to do this is by "telling stories".
There is a modern philosophical temptation, about which I believe I have written in the past, to say: "My 'knowledge' and 'the thing of which I have knowledge' are not the same. Therefore, I do not actually have knowledge of the thing in itself." This is a confusion, however. Knowledge is not the object of knowledge; it is a different kind of thing, a thing which can be about other things. If it were not a thing that can be about other things, it would not be knowledge.
In the same way, our stories about the world are not the world; but this does not mean they are arbitrary or false. They are the way we make sense of the world, and if they had nothing to do with "our actual experience", we would get nowhere, curl up and die.
It's true that we need stories to live, in the same way we need breath to live. Moreover, we need reasonably true stories to live, just as we need reasonably clean air. But -- we can live a long time on bad air as well.