当我们在旧金山湾区开始封锁时，我想起了过去抑郁和孤立的时期，我提醒自己叙事的力量。当我感觉最糟糕的时候，虚构的故事就会进入我的生活，作为一种特殊的逃避，作为兴趣和宣泄的来源，以及我在其他地方总是找不到的感觉。3月中旬，我曾如此确信，故事会再次拯救我。I could bingeParks & Recreation, and catch up on all the movies I haven’t seen, and read my way through a bottomless stack of novels.

Instead of burning through stories, though, I burned out on them. I have been streaming less television, reading fewer novels, and watching fewer movies than ever before. I don’t think the problem is just an attentional one, although I know I’m not the only one struggling with that now. My attention in reading philosophy, and on Zoom, is just fine. I think my problem is more specific: fatigue with fictional stories in particular. It’s a real surprise for someone with a huge appetite for narrative. I usually can’t get enough narrative in my life. Since I’m not aware of any technical term for this phenomenon, let me simply invent one: call this “narrative burnout.”

Look, I’m not kidding myself: narrative burnout is far from the worst problem to face during a global pandemic. In the great scheme of things, it’s a pretty trivial issue. But it is certainly an interesting one. If there is such a specific phenomenon—this fatigue with narratives in particular—it would demand some explanation.

One way to explain this particular burnout would be to understand engagement with fictional stories more fully. If there’s a special kind of mental work involved in fictional stories, then you might get tired of doing that particular kind of work, without getting tired of other kinds of mental work.

What kind of special work might that be? What practices and skills are involved in engaging with stories that are not engaged in other highly focused and skilled cognitive tasks, like reading academic research or teaching classes?

一种特殊的工作可能涉及想象力。作为一种广义的娱乐能力，想象力通过叙述以复杂的方式被吸收——尤其是通过书面和口头小说，它们不像戏剧、广播、电影和电视那样为你提供真实的图像和声音供你消费。

But in order to involve the imagination in our explanation of narrative burnout, imagination would have to involve some kind of work that you do—some mental activity that can deplete some limited resources you have available. If the role of imagination in engagement with fictional stories were just a matter of somethinghappeningto you, rather than a matter of effortful mental action, it might not help us understand how you could get specially tired of engaging with stories.

Then again, imagination is involved in lots and lots of types of thought. Thinking about the future, thinking about other people’s mental states, considering new hypotheses, and even putting together a well cooked meal can involve your imagination. So if narrative burnout is real, and it doesn’t extend fatigue to these other activities, it’s unlikely that the use of the imagination alone can explain what’s going on. What’s more, the burnout I feel extends even to those genres of fiction that seem to require less demanding imaginative work, as in TV and movies. I don’t feel like consuming fictions on film either.

我最近又考虑了另一个假设。这一全球流行病的一大压力是它的不确定性。我们不知道封锁何时结束。我们不知道什么时候会有COVID-19的治疗方法，更不用说有效的疫苗了。我们不知道什么时候我们可以重新回到工作岗位上，或者重新找到工作。这些不确定因素在很大程度上导致了我自己对情况的焦虑，它们让我渴望更多的信息。我特别渴望了解真实世界的信息:能够帮助我了解真实情况的事实和数据。也许我对叙事的新反感，是因为当我如此渴望了解现实世界的信息时，我拒绝在虚构的世界里花时间。

If this exclusive focus on the real world were to explain narrative burnout of the kind I’m feeling these days, this phenomenon might be continuous with another one which is much more thoroughly studied: the phenomenon ofimaginative resistance. Sometimes able and focused consumers of stories can resist imagining certain local aspects of stories, including events they find morally repulsive, or connections they find metaphysically confusing.

One influential example was given by the philosopher Richard Moran in his 1994 paper “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination”: it would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine our way into an alternativeMacbethin which “the facts of [Duncan’s] murder remain as they are in fact presented in the play, but it is prescribed in this alternate fiction that this was unfortunate only for having interfered with Macbeth’s sleep.”

正如Tamar Gendler恰当地总结的那样，哲学家们对这种想象中的抵抗是否来自于无法接受不可能的事情，还是来自于完全不愿意参与道德上令人发指的精神幻想，持不同意见。我们可能会问关于叙述倦怠的类似问题:我是否暂时无法以应有的方式融入故事中，或者出于某些实际或道德原因我不愿意这么做?如果存在叙述倦怠这种东西，它可能是一种更普遍的抵抗形式，与这些想象力的局部抵抗形式有一些共同之处。

It’s not clear which of these two explanations is more plausible, and it’s not clear how to identify narrative burnout—or whether it is a real, individual phenomenon. But if it is, it deserves much more research geared towards producing a philosophical explanation.

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