WHAT STORY ARE WE IN?

Searching for the shape of what happened

Photo by Anthony Lim on Unsplash

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I spent a year trying to get home. That’s the plainest way to put it. But it was only when I started to write the account of that year, which became Shattered, that I began seeing it as a kind of odyssey.

There was nothing heroic about being unable to move; being fed, washed and turned in the night by strangers, with no control of my hands, legs or bowel movements.

But the shape of the year — the accident, the succession of strange lands, each hospital its own small kingdom with its rules, monsters and moments of unexpected grace, the single fixed point of home glowing at the far end — I did not invent the contours of this story. It was Homer’s, three thousand years old. I had been living my own version of it.

Do we tell the stories of our lives through genre? Can crime, horror, romance and epic help explain our experience? Or is it that we cannot see our lives at all except through genre? The categories precede us; life follows.

Kierkegaard said that life can only be lived forwards, but understood backwards. I lived the accident, that year, but it was only in the telling — the dictating — that this universal shape emerged. It was retrospective: you do not know you are in the middle of a story until the end. I was just writing my way home.

Slavoj Žižek made the case that most people, on the morning of September 11th, 2001, didn’t understand what they were watching until they reached for disaster movies. The towers collapsing were a spectacle, one, uncannily, we’d seen before.

Baudrillard went further. The Gulf War, he said, had already shown that the image, rather than helping us process the event, actually replaces it, so that a war fought largely through footage becomes, in his phrase, a war that “did not take place” at all, only its hyperreal broadcast.

Ecological catastrophe works similarly. We have been thrust into this genre right now, with droughts, floods, earthquakes and food shortages. Cinema has anticipated this for decades. When the real thing arrives, we’ve already seen it.

Stranger still, the videos of American strikes on Iran, edited and released by the Trump administration with the pacing of a film trailer, are not art anticipating life, nor life imitating art, but the two collapsing into one another: actual war produced to look like the war movie it will later be compared to.

And perhaps most importantly, the world is now being radically altered by ideas from 1960s science fiction. AI, space colonies and electrified vehicles are all ideas dreamt up by novelists decades before anyone had the technology to build them.

We can take almost any period of our lives and locate the genre within it. Our love affairs are never original; as La Rochefoucauld said, “People would never fall in love if they hadn’t heard it talked about.”

When, a decade ago, my former accountant scammed me out of my life savings, and it tipped into a police investigation, and he was sent to prison, I was thrust into a con-man crime story. There was the dawning realisation; the betrayal by someone trusted; the slow accumulation of evidence; the other victims; the larger conspiracy — and my embarrassment, if not shame. And my fight back through writing it up. (You can read about it here).

In an earlier blog entitled The Leather, , I told the story of my former best friend, an ebullient and charismatic young man undone by addiction. I told it, without quite deciding to, as a tragedy. I was enamoured of his charm and wide, esoteric interests. But he was flawed, and his descent, in hindsight, feels inevitable now. I didn’t contrive the shape of a tragedy; rather, I gave my experience a form the audience could recognise. Without genre, there is only the raw material of the account. Catharsis is only possible within an already formulated framework.

British social-mobility films of the late fifties and early sixties — Room at the Top, Billy Liar, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Taste of Honey — reflected a real change already underway and, in doing so, pushed it forward.

The films dramatised this new individualism and an appetite for a life separate from one’s parents. Joe Lampton in Room at the Top, scheming his way into money and class in a Yorkshire mill town; Billy Fisher dreaming himself out of his own drab life. Art was showing audiences what a different life might look like. Julie Christie in Billy Liar, boarding the train to London: how many real people did she inspire? She was leaving home, as the Beatles told us.

In contrast, the contemporary social-mobility story is about the nihilistic con man, the liar and fraud, who rises fast, detonating everything on the way down. Industry and Euphoria, two of the most popular TV shows about young people, open inside the excess itself — wealth, status or addiction already achieved or assumed — and treat the whole condition as existential horror. If the sixties cultivated a culture of optimism, this era ends in overdose and moral collapse: the only ending plausible to us.

If moral narrative is dying as a form — replaced by fragmented YouTube, Reels and short-form social-media content — what genre are we in now? How would we tell?