Sullivan Stories: What is "post-modern genealogy"?
| "A central thesis then
begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practices, as
well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling
animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his
history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But
the the key question for men is not about their own
authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am
I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question’Of
what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ We
enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed
characters-roles into which we have been drafted -and we
have to learn what they are in order to be able to
understand how others respond to us and how our responses
to them are apt to be construed. It is through hearing
stories of wicked stepmothers, good but misguided kings,
wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive
no inheritance but must make their own way in the world
and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous
living and go into exile to live with the swine, that
children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a
parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the
drama into which they have been born and what the ways of
the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave
them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as
in their words. Hence there is no way to give us an
understanding of any society, including our own, except
through the stock of stories which constitute its initial
dramatic resources. Mythology, in its original
sense, is at the heart of things. Vico was right and so
was Joyce. And so too of course is that moral tradition
from heroic society to its medieval heirs according to
which the telling of stories has a key part in educating
us into the virtues." Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981, Notre Dame). Arguably the century's best guide to life. |