Reading The Crisis of Narration
A life without narrative does not lack events; it lacks the slow work of binding them together.
What I take from Han Byung-Chul’s The Crisis of Narration is not simply nostalgia for stories. It is a warning about a life made only of updates. There can be many events, many records, many posts, and still no narrative strong enough to hold them together.
This matters to me because research also risks becoming an update machine: papers, deadlines, prototypes, outputs. Field Notes are partly a small resistance to that. They are a way to ask what thread connects the fragments, not just how many fragments have accumulated.
Narrative is not decoration after life happens. It is one of the ways a person becomes able to stay with what happened.
Narrative is not decoration after life; it is a way of remaining with experience.
Tags: Byung-Chul Han, narrative, attention