Aleksandar Hemon: There’s something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we are the main characters. And there are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters in the stories of our lives. In other words, if we imagine ourselves brave or crazy or open, we’re more likely to make decisions in a given situation based on how we imagine ourselves, whatever the facts may be. We imagine ourselves as constitutionally possessed of good intentions, so that the outcome of our actions is always morally solid. And this is also how memoir works: I’ll tell you a story about myself and I’ll edit out all the things that don’t comply with what I think of myself. So story is the overarching or underlying template. It is the axiomatic category—the essential way to organize human knowledge. People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories. There are already new ways of telling stories.
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In retrospect, I realize I was delusional in the early 90s in Sarajevo. I was young and there were many misconceptions I depended on. For one thing, I believed in a kind of urban solidarity—in a fault line separating urban from rural. I had a notion that if you listened to rock ‘n’ roll, you had a bond with others that couldn’t be broken. The people who listened to rock ‘n’ roll, I thought, were bound together against the people who didn’t listen to rock ‘n’ roll. That, of course, didn’t work at all. Your taste in rock ‘n’ roll does not say anything about you, morally or otherwise. My misconception was closely connected to the misconception that art makes you better. That is: you expose yourself to it, you read books and read Shakespeare and watch all the right movies, and when the tough time comes, you’re likely to make the correct decision because you were ennobled by art. There’s no basis in reality for that at all. There’s no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all. […] But despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art. I make money doing this, and I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better. I do believe—and I know I shouldn’t—that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you’re not clinging to the notion of nobility. But I am, I’m clinging to it by my nails. I really can’t justify it intellectually. I’d argue against it rationally. Yet, if it wasn’t for that—what would this life be? What would this world be? What the fuck would we do? I’m fully aware that it’s something that cannot be accomplished by me or anyone, but it’s something to strive for, and fail at, daily. More here.