讲故事与叙事2020theconvivialsociety.substack.com编辑精选
叙事的崩塌
Narrative Collapse
导读
这篇文章讨论的是“叙事崩塌”：当人们习以为常、用来组织事件与意义的故事框架再也无法容纳现实时，会发生什么。对写作者来说值得一读，因为它逼我们反思：叙事既是理解世界的工具，也是一种会失灵、会反噬的简化。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
把叙事当成压缩工具，而不是事实本身：写之前先问自己“我为了讲清这个故事，删掉了哪些复杂性”。
- 02
动笔前承认自己的框架可能是错的，先写下与主题冲突的事实，再决定故事怎么讲；这样能为后续改写留出余地。
- 03
别把复杂现实塞进“好人—坏人—解救”的现成模板；同样的事件，多问“还有哪些参与者、哪些更长的背景”。
- 04
当现实过于混乱、讲不出圆满故事时，可以如实写出破碎感，而不是硬造一个完整结局。
HN 评论精选
叙事是有损压缩，应当把它当工具用、随时准备替换，而不是依附于它。
我成年后学到的最有用的一句话是“不要死死抱住你的叙事”。编故事是一种生存技能：我们把世界的真相简化成“叙事”这类抽象物，好塞进脑子、便于操作，这基本是种有损压缩。当出现与叙事矛盾的事实，轻则带来焦虑和怀疑，重则大脑干脆不让你看见它们。如果你能在直觉层面承认自己每个叙事大概都是错的，新事实出现时就更容易接受，也能更快更新你的“工作叙事”。别停止使用叙事这个工具，但别对某一个叙事产生依恋——它们很容易碎，也很容易被替换。
blamestross查看英文原文
The most powerful thing I have learned in my adult life is this: "Don't cling to your narrative" Making narratives is a survival technique. We simplify and reduce the truth of our world to abstractions like "narrative" in order to be able to fit them into our brains and operate on them. Mostly it is a lossy compression. When we observe facts that contradict a narrative, at best they cause us anxiety and doubt, for the narrative is a safe place who's shelter is now known to be a weaker place. At worst, our minds protect us from those facts by not even allowing our eyes to focus upon them. If you do you best to admit at a gut level that every narrative you have is probably wrong, it gets easier to handle it when new facts emerge, and helps you update your new "working narrative" faster. Don't stop using the tool of narrative, but don't get attached to this one, they break easy and they are easy to replace.
流行的叙事会把漫长复杂的历史压缩成一个英雄故事，写作者要警惕这种简化。
强烈推荐亚当·柯蒂斯的作品，尤其是纪录片《苦湖》，还有《超正常化》。他也受鲍德里亚对叙事的批判影响。鲍德里亚有篇文章我总记得，他预言了信息时代的“新闻循环”：24小时新闻的节奏会不断冲刷、抹平叙事。在《黑客帝国》开头，尼奥把光盘藏在一本挖空的鲍德里亚著作里，这不是巧合——鲍德里亚花了很多篇幅谈叙事如何经常被误当成现实。他90年代初有一组文章标题大致是《海湾战争不会发生》《海湾战争没有正在发生》《海湾战争没有发生》，他想说的是：我们脑中那场“海湾战争”是一个关于伊拉克入侵、我们拯救了世界的故事，而现实要复杂得多，涉及数百年的背景和远为更多的参与者。
jeromescuggs查看英文原文
i highly recommend the work of adam curtis, in particular his documentary "bitter lake", and perhaps "hypernormalisation". he was influenced by baudrillard's critiques of narrative as well, one of baudrillard's essays that always sticks with me is "pataphysics of the year 2000", in which he predicts the 'news loops' in which narratives are obliterated in the 24-hour news cycle of our information age. in the Matrix, at the beginning of the film, Neo hides some discs in a hollowed-out copy of a Baudrillard work, which isn't coincidental - baudrillard spent alot of time talking about how narratives often were confused with reality, though this is a very simplified explanation my favorite essays he did to critique narrative were a series he did in the early 90's: -"The Gulf War Will Not Happen" -"The Gulf War Isn't Happening" -"The Gulf War Didn't Happen" i might be misremembering the exact titles, but the sort of point he was trying to make is that in our minds, the 'gulf war' is a story about iraq invading a country, and us saving the day. The reality of it was so much more complex, involving centuries of background involving way more participants.
读者会怀疑：当现实只剩混乱与伤害时，究竟还能不能讲出一个令人信服的故事。
这话听起来很犀利，但我跟不上。作为“讲故事”的叙事显然至关重要。可能和很多人一样，我很难看到我们正在经历的一切能长出什么令人满意的故事：人们歇斯底里地叫喊，人们毫无意义地伤残死亡，这看起来更像悲剧性的混乱。
downerending查看英文原文
This sounds incisive, but I'm not really smart enough to follow it. Certainly narrative as "story-telling" seems crucially important. And probably like many, it's hard for me to see a really satisfying story coming out of what we're going through. People screaming madly, people being senselessly maimed and killed. It seems more like tragic chaos.
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