Triumph of Narrative

Who better to deliver a clever account of narrative within mass media then a Globe & Mail columnist selected for the Massey Lectures Series? I picked up this book because the title caught my eye. The preface hooked me and I ended up reading the entire book in a day because Robert Fulford is a great storyteller. I knew little of Fulford before, but now I am a dedicated fan. The story he tells passes through various stages and styles to deliver a refreshing perspective on a topic usually over-simplified and misunderstood. An important insight is that we interpret the world around us as tales and fables. We understand complex emotions and ideas through storytelling and exist within our own consciousness as imaginative storytellers. Everybody has a story to tell and everyone wants to feel that their story is just as relevant as anyone else's. Perhaps we don't seek icons to worship, but are in fact voyeurs in search of our own inner narratives to experience safely as spectators.

You should read the print version of Triumph of the Narrative, even if you heard him on "Ideas" on CBC.

In the essays, Robert Fulford documents narrative approaches to history, in (popular) fiction and rumour, even connecting one narrative to the Southern Plantation secessionists of the Civil War. According to Mark Twain and Fulford, the Southern planters adapted their own knighthood and chivalry cult, borrowing heavily from Walter Scott's published legends of romance.
On "Ideas," I caught the bit about the literary devices (like the unreliable narrator in fiction). But I did not see how carefully Fulford related his theme to the post-modernists and other severe critics of narrative style and device. In these essays, Robert Fulford patronizes the deconstructionists pitilessly and without grace. But he also points directly to where romantic narrative, both fiction and history, has led civilization monstrously astray. And he is in good company.

Fulford writes with directness and with craft. But I suspect him of being more of a dialectician than he admits.
This little volume stimulates thought and it renewed my interest in ways of thinking that I had recently neglected. I am grateful to Fulford.