Mentioning 'Narrative'

There are those words which have lapsed and gone to cliché bardo where they shriek and gibber and seek a hapless channel that they may find a life again in the witless. Such a word, surely, and ‘surely’ is itself lost to polite use; is the word ‘narrative’. There, I’ve put it between the prison bars of single quotes which render it harmless withal twee. The solemn obsequies of catachresis have been performed yet it retains its baffling power. If it could only have stayed within the bounds of Scottish Law meaning a statement of the essential facts of the case as in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. No it was not satisfied with that sturdy if contended status, it had to bring ‘irony’ into it. There are, you, see no facts of the case and agreement is factitious. In this spirit the memoir of John Burnside, A Lie about My Father sprinkles ‘narrative’ about. His da was a foundling or more correctly a stepling having been left on a doorstep as an infant to be raised by a series of informal fosterings as a human pass the parcel. Burnside is a poet and ought to know that a joke is all well and good until it escapes.