Searching for the Self: Classic Stories, Christian Scripture, and the Quest for Personal Identity

by Adrian T. Smith

More importantly, this section is descriptive, not prescriptive or normative.

For convenience, I will gather the personal myths under the “seven basic plots” (discussed in chapter 8), beginning with the “quest” archetype.

Quests

Mid-life is, typically, the time when reality pushes back via reminders of mortality (for instance, the death of one’s parents). The ensuing feeling of futility brings us to a crisis, a crossroads. Those who find a path beyond the crossroads must pass three tests, resembling those ordeals experienced by heroes in classic romances (and known by their Greek labels): first test agon the hero must confront the negative forces in battle second test pathos the hero must suffer loss in the life-and-death struggle third test anagnorisis the hero must recognize, by discovery or epiphany, the deeper meaning and truer realization of their quest

Voyage-and-Return

Think of George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London), choosing to live on the streets with homeless vagrants, in order to chronicle the experience.

The scripts lived by Orwell and Hemingway belong to an exceedingly broad and diverse cluster of narratives, which we may label adventures. According to psychologist Karl E. Scheibe, much of our behavior, individual and collective, only makes sense when viewed as adventures undertaken to generate life stories.454

These archetypes express our need to foreground novelty, variety, and risk whenever the background of routine and security stultifies us. Adventures offer thrills, a plotline of “fear, voluntary entry, and hope for survival.”457 If we live to tell the tale, the tale itself becomes our supreme gain. We have a life story. Other people will listen.

The genre of the lived adventure features innumerable specific tales: travel; rollercoaster rides; sport; gambling; etc. (the list is endless). The thrill, and the greater prize of a life story, may be experienced directly or vicariously. (In the interests of full disclosure: When my soccer team, Chelsea FC, at last [and against improbable odds] attained the “holy grail” by becoming champions of Europe, in a don’t-dare-to-watch penalty kick shootout, my wife expected my reaction to be an unleashing of ecstatic euphoria. Instead, I sat with uncanny calmness, “reasoning” that, since I “shared” in Chelsea’s triumph, none of the myriad problems in the rest of my life had any weight whatsoever.)

Scheibe highlights sport and gambling as the most popular modern American adventures. “Common games of sport and gambling are but stripped down, stylized and abbreviated dramas, inviting the direct or vicarious participation of masses of people seeking for some adventure, no matter how miniscule, to provide story matter for their lives.”458 Although my marathon-running script is now thirty years old, it still shapes my personal identity. Periodically, I ret...

According to Scheibe, sport and gambling have replaced warfare as the main sources of adventure. Like warfare, sport and gambling offer the prize of ...

Ascent As we noted above, this plotline exerts a powerful tug upon adolescents. A time of awakening to literature coincides with a strong call to establish one’s own identity and independence. Nothing like a good coming-of-age novel to draw out a fledgling voice. And no fictional character has given so much voice to so many readers as J. D. Salinger’s creation Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye).461

How to be authentic, how to avoid becoming a “phony”—this became Phil’s story of ascent.

Charles Dickens, shaped by personal experience, became the master narrator of this genre. “Dickens had known the harsh life of poverty, even—when he was a child—debtor’s prison, with his family.”463

As a teenager, I shared her dread of a lifetime of mindless work. Back in the seventies, my hope of ascent came not from fiction, but from biography. Specifically, the life of world chess champion Bobby Fischer. I was a good-enough chess player to be seduced by his script (but, sadly, nowhere near good enough to replicate his success on the sixty-four squares). The teenage Fischer always brought a pocket chess set to school, for use during “boring” classes. When teachers confiscated the chess set, he continued analyzing the moves in his head. Inspired by his example, I would bring a chess set to geography lessons, perching it ostentatiously upon my desk, inviting its confiscation in the hope of activating the Fischer script.

Looking back, I still have no regrets. The mental exertions of chess honed my analytical imagination (pretty useful for a professor). Even more, the monk-like dedication of the chess player kept me from many of the behavioral trainwrecks of my teenage peers. Stories of ascent may have appeal beyond adolescence. In chapter 2, I give the backstory of this book. In essence, I view this book as the “protagonist” in a plot of ascent. The book (personified!) struggles to achieve mature expression (or at least adolescent vocalization) of the embryonic idea conceived shortly after my father’s funeral in 2008. (I’ll let the reader guess what is oppressive in the book’s social milieu.)

Dragon Slaying

In our time, one event universally labeled evil (at least on American soil) occurred on September 11, 2001.

In the aftermath, I seriously contemplated converting my knowledge of ancient Hebrew into knowledge of Arabic. (The two languages are very similar.) I could work for the CIA, I reasoned, and help translate intercepted Arabic messages from terrorist networks.

Around the time of the Second World War, Turkish troops slaughtered over 1.5 million Armenians, an atrocity “called the ‘silent genocide’ since it has always been denied by the Turkish government.”467 The 1970s witnessed a wave of Armenian terrorism “in response” to the silent genocide. However, Armenian scholar Khachig Tölölyan refuses to reduce such terrorism to political protest. He argues that Armenian terrorism must be understood as an attempt to construct a narrative identity.468 Robbed of their homeland by acts of genocide, the Armenian Diaspora preserved their identity by reciting the stories of national heroes. In Sunday School, Armenian-Americans would recite, “I am Armenian, I am Armenian, the grandchild of valiant Vartian.”469 Vartian who? The fifth century Armenian leader, who resisted unto death Persian attempts to impose the Zoroastrian religion upon his people. Armenian terrorists garb their actions in Vartian’s clothing, leading Tölölyan to claim: [Armenian terrorism] is not the product of a particular individual’s alienation, but the manifestation of a desire to give one’s individual life an iconic centrality in the eyes of the community, which professes to value certain forms of behavior articulated in narratives.470 The true audience of Armenian terrorism remains the Armenian Diaspora, whose fraying culture is constituted to a remarkable degree by old stories, and who see in contemporary terrorists Vartan’s refusal to abandon cultural identity and natio...

Comedy

In the classic comedic plotline, reconciliation happens via moments of recognition or epiphany, when a character learns to see the “other” in a new light. In life, comedic literature itself can provoke the insight that leads to reconciliation.

These case studies offer a valuable generalization: the meaning of an action to an agent depends entirely on the narrative they have chosen to inhabit.

In discussing comedic plotlines, we have noted that comedic literature (like Pride and Prejudice) can trigger the real-life epiphanies that promote social reconciliation.

Rebirth For many survivors of abuse, rebirth was experienced through reading Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

One survivor testifies: “This book’s pages dissolved the bars of my cage, and I felt myself fly free for the first time . . . [The book] instilled in me the pivotal message that I could transcend the nightmare . . . of abuse.”478

Tragedy

Read the following description of romantic thinkers, and observe their enthusiastic embrace of the tragic plotline: “They believed in the necessity of fighting for your beliefs to the last breath in your body . . . they believed in the value of martyrdom as such, no matter what the martyrdom was martyrdom for . . . they believed that minorities were more holy than majorities, that failure was nobler than success.”482

In the twentieth century, romanticism expressed itself in the philosophy of existentialism.484

And then there is Jesus of Nazareth, who seems to have enthusiastically embraced a script with a strongly tragic dimension: Now they were on the way up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was leading them . . . And he took the twelve aside again, and began to tell them what was about to happen to him: “Look, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and scribes, who will condemn him to death and deliver him to the Gentiles, who will mock him, spit on him, whip him, and kill him.” (Mark 10:32–34)485

The Monomyth

No one has advanced the notion of subconscious archetypes more than Freud and Jung. No surprise, then, that both men structure their autobiographies according to the dictates of the monomyth. In constructing their life stories, some factual tweaking was necessary.

But I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For Wait a second. If people are living stories, and if stories change lives, why are so many of us so screwed up? Are we choosing bad stories? Are our stories changing us for the worse? Good questions, generating more conflict than I can handle in one chapter. But I will offer three challenges to my fellow Don Quixotes out there. As in many a classic quest, these challenges are offered in ascending order of difficulty.

Uniqueness When constructing your personal life story, you can’t buy it off the shelf, it must be tailored to fit your unique character plus setting.

Sadly, in the Christian community, there are many well-meaning folk eager to impose a one-size-fits-all narrative upon each and every one of us.

In my early twenties, young in the faith, I wanted to resist the constrictive narratives on offer, but lacked the resources. Nevertheless, I continued to search for an authentic storyline. Encouragement came from a very strange place—the promise of Jesus in Revelation 2:17: “I will give him a white stone, and on the stone a new name written which no one knows except him who receives it.”

If individuals must search for the “white stone” of authentic narrative identi...

The community-forming narratives of the four Gospels do indeed work with archetypes (see chapter 10 above). However, their diversity implies the need to find a version of the Jesus story that “fits.” I love how the early church depicted the four canonical Gospels using the imagery of the four mythical beasts from Revelation 4:7. Each bears witness to Jesus, but in its own way. Mark roars like a lion. John soars like an eagle. Matthew, beginning with Jesus’ genealogy, has a human face. Luke, beginning in the temple, has the face of a sacrificial beast, the ox.489

Minor Characters

Let’s grasp this nettle. If you imagine your life as a story, do you see yourself as the “main character”? If so, does this ever trouble you? Is assuming the role of “main character” the irreducible equivalent of egocentricity?

Whenever I discuss this book with (Reformed) Christians, and offer up the your-life-is-a-story proposal, I can pretty much guarantee they will fire back, “But we are not the main character!” (If only I had a nickel for every time . . . ) Obviously, they mean that God is (or should be) the “main character” in everyone’s story. And, at some level, it’s hard to disagree. (One only has to read, say, the letter of Paul to the Ephesians, to see how all of history unfolds “to the praise of God’s glory.”) I’m not questioning the doxological motivation of my Reformed friends.

For a literary critic, “main character” need mean no more than a constant presence, whose experiences give cohesion to the narrative arc of the story. That is what (and all) I mean when I encourage readers to see themselves as protagonists in a plot.

For example, suppose we tell (like many Christians, Reformed or not) our personal narrative using a rebirth plot archetype (“born again!”)

Or consider a cinematic example. Who is the “main character” in the 1989 classic Dead Poets Society? Robin Williams, right? The charismatic school teacher, John Keating, whose inspiration made his boys’ lives extraordinary. Well, Keating certainly was the catalyst, the game-changer, for his students. But (as the title of the film suggests), the plot can be seen as the students’ coming-of-age, finding their voice. The archetype of ascent. The boys who (inspired by Keating) reconvened the Dead Poets Society—their collective experience provides the narrative arc of the film, giving coherence to the plot. In that sense, the boys are the main character. (As confirmation of this, recall how many key scenes Keating is absent from.)

To expand this discussion, consider the storyline of the Old Testament. From Exodus onwards, whose experiences give coherence to the dramatic arc? Israel’s! So, from the point of view of narrative unity, Israel is the main character. And this observation is totally compatible with recognizing that—from other points of view—God is the main character. The game-changer. The morally superior agent.

But back to the nagging question. If stories can (and should) be told from multiple viewpoints, are there merits in seeing myself as a “minor” character in the stories playing out around me? I believe so.

In my vocation as professor, I obtain guidance from V. Propp’s study of Russian folktales.492 He mentions two minor archetypal functions in quest narratives—the “dispatcher” and the “donor.” If I imagine my students as protagonists, here’s how these minor roles help me become part of their story. The “dispatcher” informs the hero of the absence of something essential to life, and provokes the hero’s journey to find what is missing. How (I ask myself) can I help students see their need for wisdom? (Especially those who already have all the answers before they arrive at seminary, and only enrolled for the diploma.) Once students begin their quest for wisdom, they eventually need a “donor”—someone who imparts a gift to be unwrapped in the future, in the hour of great need, to ensure the successful completion of their quest for wisdom. In class, I sometimes propose ideas that make little sense in students’ present intellectual framework—ideas that may prove surprisingly helpful once that framework has collapsed.

Let me wrap up this discussion of roles with a question: Could one definition of “love” be the willingness to be a “minor character” in the stories of other people?

Poi...

But what if (as speculated in chapter 8) archetypal stories are merely pointers to a definitive narrative, the narrative of Jesus?