What Postmodernism Says of Narratives

To everyone who is reading this blog, I should forewarn you my ideas are probably going to come off as unstructured gibberish, but nevertheless I am going to try my hardest to mold my beliefs into words that will be comprehendible to everyone in this class. So, with that all said here I go.

This week in Dominguez’s class we focused on the theory of postmodernism in relation to the viewpoint of Lyotard. Although we learned much more from Lyotard than just his theories on narratives, I’m going to focus on his theories of “Metanarratives” and “Local Narratives”. Okay, so really what is the difference between these two? I guess the best way I would explain it would be that Metanarratives are used to explain the Local Narratives., or better, Local Narratives are only a small piece of the bigger Metanarratives.

So, now that we understand the difference between these two, let’s figure out why they are so vital in societies. To me, I would say that the Narratives function to explain a phenomenon of the world without getting into the scientific elements of the subject. We must remember that there was a time when people did not have the technological resources available to explain some things occurring in the world. So, for the sake of everyone’s sanity, when a question came up like: “How was the Earth created?” it was natural to come up with a huge Metanarrative that would explain how it came to be. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that these Narratives all presented truth in their telling, but they served as acceptable answers to the people who had no logic or science to back up their questions. Also, it is much more soothing to the minds of people to have an answer to these sorts of questions than to simply say “I don’t know how that came to be.” Even in Brave New World, we see this happening. Recall if you will, when John asks Linda of the process on how to make chemicals. Her response of uncertainty makes John uncomfortable, he wants an answer and so he goes to the old men of the pueblo for answers. The men tell him a story of how the world came to be with “the Fog of Increase” and the “Four wombs”. Recall again what John says in his thoughts to this, “The old men of the pueblo had much more definite answers” (pg.130). As you can see, people are more willing to accept answers to their questions, no matter how illogical the answer seems to be, it is easier to accept that than to accept an abstract concept of “I don’t know”.

So, with all this said let’s find out some actual situations where Narratives actually have controlled societies. Well, in ancient tribes such as the Aztecs, Narratives served as the cornerstone of their societies. Narratives were told about everything, such as: the weather, the harvests, and the health of the tribe. So, if a bad harvest took place that year, it would be natural to come up with a Narrative that explained it. Such as, “The Gods are angry at us, and therefore we have been plagued with this terrible famine.” This was much more likely to be accepted in the society than the realization that maybe the plants were just not capable of being grown in that area. And due to the tribal belief that the Gods were upset with the people, more human sacrifices would be made that year. As you can see, Narratives had great power in some societies. Not until the human population becomes more civilized will scientific discourse be able to overrule the narrative discourses