385. Texts As Stories

Every text is a story and every writer is a storyteller. Even the most conceptual, theory-laden, abstract text is still a narrative. For every text weaves together disparate elements into a cohesive structure using the norms of language in exactly the same way as we tell a story.

A text is a means of connecting a series of normative entities called words in order to reach a specific end, and as such it is itself a normative entity. Just as a story shows how one event leads to the next in a plausible fashion, an abstract text shows how its conclusion is reached through a chain of premises and logical inferences.

But not every text will align with our expectations or be entirely rational. Even in our most cherished stories, we allow for the chain of causality to be broken. We accept that the narrator cannot see what is coming next and that random events can happen without warning. In this way, our norms are broken, our expectations are defied, and we are shown an entirely new possibility.

We are shown that a text never has the completeness or finality that it might seem to possess. There is always something beyond it — a kind of truth that it can point to but never contain. For a text that is recognizable as a story, this is no surprise. We know that a story is always a metaphor, which means it shows us something about our experience that we would not be capable of grasping through more direct explanation.

This is also true for the most theoretical and abstract text. It is also always a metaphor for something else, for a world that has been glimpsed but that cannot be described. This is the world of beauty, truth, and goodness itself. But as we can never directly encounter this perfect world, we cannot expect our metaphors to always reveal truth.

When we read a story, we know that it describes only one possible chain of events. We automatically doubt that what happens to the story’s characters would also happen to us in the same way. It is this doubt that we must bring to the theories our abstract texts offer. We must doubt the conclusions they seem to suggest are absolutely certain. By doing so, we ensure our freedom from the normative structure of the text, which in turn allows us to reach for beauty, truth, and goodness again and again.