Mark Phillips' Pages: Workbook: 9/3/03: "Story" as reactionary literary ideology.

Jacob Lawrence, "Harriet and the Promised Land No. 4. A Mother Tells the Story of Moses," (1967) — Jacob Lawrence, *Harriet and the Promised Land No. 4. A Mother Tells the Story of Moses* (1967)

September 3, 2003:

"Story" as reactionary literary ideology. Simple teleology in which the logic of some outcome is projected backward through the required chain of events, which are then falsely interpreted as determinant.

The 20th century wanted to be the epoch in which deterministic causality was superseded by logics of complexity. Probabilistic determination; systems theory; chaos theory. Literary Modernism and especially Postmodernism have tried to pull the logics of narration forward to the same sophistication as contemporary physics. "Story" wants to turn that clock back to the time of Aristotle's far-fetched unities.

Far-fetched, because radically different than life. In life outcomes are so subtly and multiply interdetermined that we often feel we can't find the determinants at all. So that we seldom experience things as finished.