Grand narratives

This morning I attended a session on Narrative Gerontology (passing by my usual menu choice of "trends in active life expectancy"). Dominated by English and psychology professors, the presentations were much more philosophical than my usual conference fare.

I was particularly entranced by one speaker, Mark Freeman, who described his mother's decline in dementia and his struggle to write about it. As a narrative psychologist, his academic interest is in how we talk about our lives and now he finds himself unable to construct a narrative for his mother's decline. Lately he has been involved, it seems, in a controversy over the relevance of "big stories" versus "small stories." The main problem, as I understand it, is that some argue that small stories, the everyday narrative interactions in which we engage, are better indicators of reality than the grand narratives, the life stories, we construct over time. The small story camp argues that the life story process, with its attempt to construct and create coherence, produces not true identity, but some manufactured sense of what a self-identity should be. Freeman says that it is precisely the distance from events that allows a person to truly understand the meaning of an event. Big stories aren't better or truer, they are different. He uses the term "life on holiday" to talk about the value of time for reflection and reconsideration. We do things differently on a holiday, and that difference is good.

I'm thinking about this...