H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 0 8inevitable ignorance. Narratives must find a way of suggesting that
there could be many versions of their subject- matter beside their
own. If they are not to appear deceptively absolute, they must point
to their own arbitrariness. Samuel Beckett sometimes sets out on
one tall tale, aborts it almost as soon as it is off the ground, then
launches an equally pointless one in its place.
Modern storytelling, in other words, has lost the kind of neces-
sity it had in the days when poets would recount the mythical
origins of the tribe or sing its military victories. Now, telling a tale
has become gratuitous. It has no foundation in reality, as the
origins of the tribe or the history of the nation are supposed to
have. So stories have to be self- sustaining. They can appeal to no
authority but their own, unlike the author of Genesis or Dante’s
Divine Comedy. This gives the storyteller a lot more room to
manoeuvre. But it is a negative kind of freedom. We live in a world
in which there is nothing that cannot be narrated, but nothing that
needs to be either.
There are narratives which have stringent limits but which do
not seem aware of the fact. Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton
is a case in point. Its male protagonist, John Barton, is a down- at-
heel industrial worker in Victorian Manchester who becomes a
political militant. When he does so, however, he seems to disap-
pear beyond the horizon of the story, or at least beyond its compre-
hension. He can be felt lurking on its margins, but is no longer seen
head- on. The novel even seems uncertain as to what kind of
activist he is, whether a Chartist, a communist or otherwise. And if
the book itself does not know, then nobody does. Barton has
entered a shadowy world into which the story he appears in, with
its own more conventional political views, simply cannot follow
him. It is significant in this respect that Gaskell originally intended