I “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” This must be the most overly admired sentence by the most overly admired writer of our time. It is the renowned opening of Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album,” a canonical document of high-end alienation, and it long ago achieved fortune-cookie status. Didion was making the unsophisticated point that we abhor incoherence and so we attempt to defeat it by ordering it with interpretation. “We interpret what we see.” Yes, yes. “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.” We certainly do, though this is still a long way from an interesting view of knowledge. The problem, of course, is that the phantasmagoria keeps shifting. No sooner has Didion stabilized the mental situation than incoherence again rears its ugly head. It turns out that stories may not settle the matter. “I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling. I suppose this period began around 1966 and ended around 1971.” There follows her account, so adamantly cool as to be overheated, of the grand convulsions of the 1960s, which in her telling turns out to have been a lot of fun: she is in a recording studio with the Doors (“Manzarek ate a hard-boiled egg”), she hangs out with Eldridge Cleaver, she shops at I. Magnin for the dress (“Size 9 Petite”) that Linda Kasabian will wear at her trial for the murder of Sharon Tate and the others at the house on Cielo Drive owned by Roman Polanski (“[he] and I are godparents to the same child”). She also goes to Hawaii a lot. Didion finds no meaning in any of this, only a vast disorientation, a senseless crack-up. “I believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondences, but in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else did.” Hers are stories unlike other stories, because they are “stories without narrative.” But of course there is a narrative — “a script” — in Didion’s annals of her adventures, which she, like all narrators, has composed according to a principle of selection, a criterion of significance, from among all the incidents of her life in that period. It is the conventional narrative, of which she was one of the primary authors, that the 1960s were history’s epic pivot, that nothing since has ever been the same or will ever again be what it seems to be, that there never were phantasmagoria like those phantasmagoria, that the participants in those convulsions (and certainly their chroniclers) were aristocrats of consciousness, that the highest status is insiderhood and the chief arena of significance is the scene, that Dionysus is an American, that reason is for squares, that it is too late for liberalism, that the entertainment industry stands in some relationship to questions of ultimate importance, that we are living in (and driving through, with the wind in our hair) the ruins of our civilization — the whole helter-skelter-gimme-shelter narrative of the second half of the twentieth century in America. This, too, is a story, an invented version, a constructed tale; it is the tale of breakdown and privilege that Didion peddled, with epicene austerity, in all her writing. She made incoherence chic. Her contribution to the culture of her time was not to warn it about the seductions of story — as per her famous adage, if indeed it is a warning — but to invent a new story for it, a story of storylessness. She was not alone in this enterprise, obviously: her story is an old story. The fracture and fragmentation of experience is one of the cliches of modern culture, the failure of traditional narrative to capture a reality that has allegedly outstripped our powers of understanding and representation. She, too, told herself a story, a calming and fortifying story, in order to live. She, too, could not suffice with what a Muslim thinker once called the incoherence of the incoherence. Maybe nobody can. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” This is a practical view of narrative. We tell stories because we need them. We tell the ones that meet the need. Without them we could not stir, or in any way advance; we would be stranded in the inundation of random occurrences, in confusion and fear. And the stories that we tell about ourselves are ourselves; they create us, which is to say, we create us. The striking thing about this utilitarian view of narrative — and about the larger belief in the supremacy of narrative — is its indifference to the question of truth. Compare Didion’s sentence with another famous one: “We possess art lest we perish of the truth.” Nietzsche made that observation in 1888. It, too, is a practical recommendation, concerned more with the wounding psychological consequences of a perfect lucidity than with the actual substance of what we cannot bear to know. It is odd to hear Nietzsche speak of the truth, when it was he who gave the world “perspectivism” and degraded truth into an expression of power; but at least his formulation comes with the implication that it is indeed truth that may be too much for us, that truth is what we are evading when we accept the embroideries of narrative. We tell ourselves lies in order to live. Yet the alternative to truth that Nietzsche contemplates, the preference for a more pleasing and elevating standpoint, is not merely what used to be called, in Didion’s California, a “coping mechanism.” It is not a shelter for the weak but a value for the strong. He precedes his comment with this: “For a philosopher to say, ‘the good and the beautiful are one,’
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence