Randy Nikkel Schroeder's Blog: Chigozie Obiama and The Audacity of Style

Don Cherry, Dumb Canada, and Narrative Form

Finally, painfully, with excruciating moratorium, Canadian "icon" Don Cherry was fired from Hockey Night in Canada this weekend. How is it that this chronic purveyor of easily falsifiable prejudice and misinformation could have occupied this well-paid platform for so long?

I think part of the problem is the structure of story and narrative itself, and boy howdy, did Cherry ever partake of, maintain, live inside of , a simplistic narrative of what it means to be Canadian.

This is not the place to rehearse extensively how narrative, as a default mode of organizing information, a mode that is unique to our species, gives rise to oversimplified and prejudicial views of the world. But I will mention that disciplines like narratology, linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology have analyzed quite extensively the ways in which Story--all stories, by nature of their in-built structure and modal format--function as simplified, memorable "schemata" to account for stimuli.

The narrative accounts we live through, regardless of culture or context, are never particularly realistic or accurate, because they by definition lack the fine granularity that accuracy requires. (Are they prejudicial by definition?)

Further, stories shoe-horn the world's complex flows of information into representational formats that privilege character, choice, action and consequence. But is that the way our physical universe and social worlds really work? Is that even the way our experience, personally and collectively, really flows, shifts, and adapts?

I am beginning to wonder at this point whether "changing the narrative," or "thickening the narrative," or "adding to the narrative," or even "listening to the stories of others" comprise an adequate response to the kind of nonsense the world's Trumps and Cherries spew. Has it ever worked to fight narrative fire with narrative fire? Have we not engaged in enough Story throughout our species' remarkable consistent history of demonizing--that is, narrativizing--the other?

Strange thoughts, perhaps, for a novelist. But hopefully a useful provocation.