Fitting things into the narrative
I'm glad that Jo Shapcott came through her cancer, and that she found it a valuable experience and got poetry out of it, but I am still irked at this narrative trope that terrible experiences - if they don't actually make you stronger if they don't kill you - make people in some way better persons or are some kind of transformative experience.
(I do like the idea that Stella Gibbons puts into the mouth of one of her characters in Westwood, or the Gentle Powers*, 1946, about the value of gentle powers in life rather than huge seismic emotional experiences.)
I am also irked at the way GoodReads tries to make one indicate what one 'learned' from the book one has just checked as read.
I do get that people like to make narrative meaning out of the random stuff that life throws at them, and I was very struck at how many people (or so it seemed ) came to the point of that ten-day meme which was something like '6 things you really regret doing' (or was it 'mistakes you wish you hadn't made'?), but, anyway, saying, more or less, 'but if I hadn't done X thing that seemed totally regrettable at the time, I wouldn't now be in Y position, and the latter is a good thing'.
This also arose for me with that book I was posting about the other week about oral histories of marriage in the UK during the first half of the C20th. The conclusion goes on about how in spite of all the negativity and constraints around sex, the couples and individuals whose marriages hadn't been total disaster areas all presented them as positive and loving. And I just wondered to what extent distance was lending enchantment to the view and if they'd been questioned at different life stages their take on the relationship would have been very different. And, of course, a relationship enduring over decades becomes its own success story (even if I now think of Rebecca West's riff apropos of the Emperor Franz Josef that quite banal things become 'wonderful' if performed routinely over a period of years by a very elderly person).
(Making narrative meaning out of one's own life is, I think, different from trying to make narrative sense of other people's actions...)
*'Beauty, and Time, and the Past and Pity... Laughter, too--you need calming and lifting into the light, not plunging into darkness and struggle.'
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