N a r r a t i v e1 0 7then, as the anthropologist Claude Lévi- Strauss has put it, it must
have been born ‘at a stroke’.
So the idea of narrative is thrown into crisis. For modernism,
knowing where something began, even if this were possible, will
not necessarily yield you the truth about it. To assume so is to be
guilty of what has been called the genetic fallacy. There is no one
grand narrative, simply a host of mini- narratives, each of which
may have its partial truth. One can give any number of accounts of
even the most humble aspect of reality, not all of which will be
mutually compatible. It is impossible to know what trifling inci-
dent in a story might prove momentous in the end, rather as for the
biologists it is hard to know which lowly form of life might evolve
in the fullness of time into something exceptional. Who, contem-
plating a slimy, self- involved little mollusc billions of years ago,
would have imagined the emergence of Tom Cruise? Stories try to
foist some design on this weblike world, but in doing so they
succeed only in simplifying and impoverishing it. To narrate is to
falsify. In fact, one might even claim that to write is to falsify.
Writing, after all, is a process which unfolds in time, and in this
respect resembles narrative. The only authentic literary work, then,
would be one which is conscious of this falsification, and which
tries to tell its tale in a way that takes it into account.
This is to say that all narratives must be ironic. They must
deliver their accounts while keeping their own limitations
constantly in mind. They must somehow incorporate what they do
not know into what they know. The limits of the story must
become part of the story. This is one reason why some of Conrad’s
narrators, or the storyteller of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier,
are at pains to acknowledge their own blind spots. It is as though
the nearest one can come to the truth is a confession of one’s