Of cats and dogs

I’ve been thinking a great deal about the nature of a story’s narrator. Or course, quite everything becomes a story told, though some might pretend what they narrate is just fact and the truth. But even a complex fact lacks context which a story provides. But someone must narrate that story even if just to themselves and and that narration derives from a particular time, place, psychology and motive. Now, Freud refers to the daily lives in which we engage as the dream day, and that from these activities—the dream day—the dream work draws material into a narrative structure to construct the dream. Freud says that the “The dream work . . . does not think, calculate, or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form.” That is, the dream work creates stories from the raw materials of the day and though many might say that we are more than our stories, ironically, we would not know that until we tell the story. In our waking life we story the dream-story. We narrate our lives; the character of the narrator determines the story that becomes definitive but finally, it is just a story after all.  The narrator of José Saramajo’s novel, Blindness, says, “All stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.” We tell the story so that we know what happened and what we think about what happened, but until we narrate the story, we don’t know what happened or even what we think!

In James McBride’s novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Newspaper, whose nickname is Paper, narrates the news to the community that cannot (or will not) read. But her listeners insist that she make the news be a story. One of her audience, Rusty, says to Paper, “C’mon Paper . . . story it up like you know how. Put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” Why should she do so, Paper asks Rusty, and he answers, “’Cause if you tell it any other way, it’ll sound like a lie.” Unless there is a story all that can be had is the facts, and the facts are empty and meaningless without the context from which they were first embedded and from which they were drawn. We demand context for sense and meaning, and the narration of that context provides the story. The Stage Manager in Wilder’s Our Town says, “In our town we like to know the facts about everybody,” but though the play displays the facts, that is not what the play depicts: it is the lives that Emily comes to understand as imperfect without the story. Emily says, “They don’t understand much, do they? . . . That’s all human beings are!—Just blind people.” To see only the facts is to miss life. Thus, we narrate, and “story it up . . . put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” We can always tell the story.

Engaged in daily life we have a tendency not to think very much about it: mostly people go through their diurnal existences attending to the facts. Consumed in the immediacy of experience we lack context and do not narrate, but even the slightest distance offers space for the story, and the story happens when we connect up the facts that make up our daily life. Wilder’s Emily is correct: attending to the facts the citizens of Grovers Corners don’t know anything. But the play, Wilder’s story, Our Town, well, it knows. So is it in Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake. Emily narrates to her adult daughters the story of her summer affair with the soon-to-be television and movie star, Peter Duke, a passionate affair that had ended when Duke had taken up with the actor who had replaced Emily in the play and in life when Emily’s Achilles heel had become torn. In modern parlance, Duke had ghosted Emily: he had stopped all communication with her. Hearing this story, Emily’s daughter, Maisie, responds to Duke’s behavior with anger, but about herself Emily says, “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.” She has narrated that story to her daughters. At the end of the day (and even of a life) the story tells what it all might have meant. But really it is all a story. In The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store at the livery stable “somebody’s up late and talking.” They are telling a story. And Ann Patchett’s Emily, who had also played Emily in Our Town in high school, college, and summer stock, is correct: all we ever have is the story. The facts are meaningless until they inspire the story. We define ourselves by the stories we narrate. Fatty, in McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, had learned that the Nate Timblin he has come to now known was not the same Nate Timblin who had served time in prison. “Rather, he was a story, a wisp, a legend, a force, a fright.” I think the same might be said of us all.  We know others from the stories they tell. We narrate and we hear narration: the character of the narrator is central. What story do they tell, how is the story told, and what sense generates the story. Answering these questions tells us about the narrator.

All this is a too-long prologue (and story) concerning one of Trump’s comments in the recent Presidential debate. In his story-telling Trump accused immigrants of invading—our cities and eating our cats and dogs! Invading, as if at war and by this story turning the white citizenry into endangered victims similar to the beleaguered citizens of Ukraine and Gaza. Trump said, "In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there." City officials in Springfield responded saying that there was no credibility to the accusation. It is difficult to discount the absurdity of Trump’s story here . . . but the character of the narrator of this tale is the point here. The story that Trump has narrated is a blatant lie that he has intended to pass off as truth. In fact, he has no facts and context to validate his story; he has made up everything. one has to wonder about his motive. Does he really believe his lie, which might suggest he is delusional, or is his story meant to inspire hatred and violence. Trump’s narrative characterizes him as a liar, a racist, a hate-monger. But I mclaim that Trump is the story he narrates: like Nate Timblin, certainly a fragment, but as Trump, he is a dangerous legend, a deadly force and a nightmarish fright. This narrator can at best be described as unreliable, and the stories he tells are ugly, dangerous and destructive.