“Incredulity toward metanarratives” (that is a a quotation from Lyotard, a key postmodernist). This means that the big, important, defining, confidence-inspiring myths we tell ourselves as individuals and as a culture/society/nation/world no longer hold water in the age of postmodernism. A metanarrative can be anything from a Disney movie to the U.S. constitution: a story that’s supposed to make us feel safe. Postmodernism loves ripping those stories apart.
Dr. Lucy’s weekly class email
What if the idea of a novel that offers us wisdom is a metanarrative?
Dr. Lucy on a discussion board post
Metanarrative: any story told to justify another story, esp. involving artifice; a story about oneself that provides a view of one's experiences
If a metanarrative is a story that is told to justify a lie, or a story told to influence how other people view you, then it makes sense that metanarratives cause us to reexamine the things we think are true. After all, if we stop trusting the storyteller, why should we believe anything they tell us?
We all know that person on Facebook who posts pictures of their “perfect” life - perfect house, perfect kids, perfect spouse. Every picture is curated to perfection. Realistically, we know that no one’s life can be that perfect. But, over time, we begin to accommodate this perfection into our worldview. “Everyone else’s life is so good. Why can’t my house look like that? Why can’t my kids stay clean for longer than 10 seconds?” Even though realistically we know that it’s not a true representation of life, we begin to expect that our own lives should look that way, too.
Interestingly, this idea of metanarrative seems to work in different ways for different generations. My mom’s solution is to not let people into the messy parts of her house. Her sister has not been permitted to venture past the living room in years. My generation posts pictures of “good” moments to social media, while only sharing the bad ones with close friends who we deem as understanding. But teenagers? Their approach worries me a little.
Perhaps it’s because this concept of crafting the perfect image is all they’ve ever known, teenagers at once seem to both embrace it while treating everything with a certain cynicism. They know that no one’s life could possibly be that perfect, so they automatically reject anything that feels too unreal. Photographic evidence is not to be trusted. People’s words are not to be taken at face value. Even happy, fun movies are rejected as too saccharine, too unrealistic.
Last year in my Creative Writing class, I showed the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” a classic staple of the ’80’s canon. Everyone loves Ferris, right?
Wrong.
My students hated him. They hated everything about him because everything about him was too “fake.” They hated Cameron for hanging out with him. They hated his girlfriend, Sloane, because if she dated someone like Ferris, it obviously wasn’t because she loved him. It had to be all about perception. No, the only person in the whole movie they actually liked was Ferris’s sister, Jeanie. They liked her because bad things actually happened to her, no matter how hard she tried. When I pointed out that it was just a movie and the characters were supposed to be ideals, not real, they scoffed and said that the problem was that Ferris, Cameron and Sloane did feel real. That’s the way people act today, and they don’t want to see it in their entertainment.
I really didn’t know how to respond to that.
That experience caused me to re-examine my own thinking. Why did they see such a different message in a movie that seemed so straightforward to me and my friends? Was it possible that they view other things through such a vastly different lens as well? Is this why they had such a hard time understanding the books I assign them to read? If so, how do I fix this? Can I fix it? Should I fix it?
What is the purpose of a book? I would argue that it is to understand the message that the author is trying to relay through their characters, plot, setting, and themes. After all, this is what we teach in high school English. But what if my students’ inability to understand the message that I understand has less to do with their reading comprehension than it does with their worldview? What if, as Dr. Lucy said, “What if the idea of a novel that offers us wisdom is a metanarrative?” As an avid reader, this idea shakes me to the core, but what if it’s true?
There have been books with timeless messages for generations, but we have never had a generation that has been steeped in such artificiality from the very beginning. What if their world of curated perception and living on social media has changed something that cannot be undone?
I *love* the connections you make in this post--from the selves people show on social media, to how this new generation rereads our classics, to 10:04 and its postmodern critique of metanarrative. I know what you mean about being shaken to the core; I appreciate your allowing yourself to *go there.* I wonder if that feeling is what's behind peoples' resistance to really knowing what postmodernism is all about... Beautiful post.
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