Immigration and Contingency: Choose Your Own Adventure
Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books? Called branching-path narratives or gamebooks, these were meant for readers ages 9–12. They are improvisations in which the reader determines what happens next. They sold more than 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998, when they were superseded by electronic games. They still sell a million copies annually.
As essayist Leslie Jamison argues, “a Choose book proposes a conception of character that differs from that of traditional novels” (“The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books,” New Yorker, Sept 12, 2022). Defined by the choices they make, characters in Choose books—as in life—are defined by “a range of possibilities, rather than as a series of inevitable decisions.”
We think of ourselves as possessing an authentic identity which shapes the choices we make. The Choose books acknowledge that we possess multiple selves, each authentic in their own way, in the moment that they possess us.
What is the source of branching-path narratives’ power?
Here’s how they begin:
Beware and Warning!
This book is different from other books.
You are YOU ALONE are in charge of what happens in this story.
There are dangers, choices, adventures and consequences. YOU must use all of your numerous talents and much of your enormous intelligence. The wrong decision could end in disaster—even death. But, don’t despair. At any time, YOU can go back and make another choice, alter the path of your story, and change the result.
Manipulating the font size and density, I’ve tried to recreate this opening page’s echo of the opening scroll for the Star Wars series begun in 1977, a compelling echo to adolescent audiences in 1979 or after. Like Luke Skywalker, or the hero on any quest, we are called to adventure. We are invited to change our identity.
In The Abominable Snowman (1982), for example, here’s the challenge: you have been traveling in Nepal with your buddy Carlos, but his helicopter has not been heard from. You have to decide whether to search for him or keep an appointment with a local bureaucrat. You know that the Yeti or Abominable Snowman has been seen in the region. Which do you choose, hunt down Carlos and possibly face the Yeti, or keep the appointment?
The choice here and throughout the book boils down to either being adventurous or timid. That the timid choice here is represented by meeting a bureaucrat, tips author R.A. Montgomery’s hand. It means caving into the boring: not being your own center of initiative but finding your agency from the outside. Branching-path books have many possible endings and side stories, some with over 100 variations. The Abominable Snowman’s cover promises 28 different endings. If you’re timid, they end quick, much of the book left unread, unexplored.
There are two basic narrative arcs that appeal to the two different character types that make up Montgomery’s readership. Here at the start, at your first crossroads, Montgomery has offered you an opportunity to show your stripes. Are you a yes-sayer who will go save your friend; or a no-sayer who keeps the bureaucratic appointment?
“Widely commended for its appeal to reluctant readers,” as their publicity states, no doubt many of its readers, first picking up the book, skew timid (“reluctant”) rather than adventurous.
Little surprise, the timid no-sayers get a short and unadventurous narrative. Negotiating a series of aporias (no ways through), they are challenged to become more adventurous. Because, as the introduction to the book has explained, don’t despair, at any time you can go back and make the bolder choice….
In sum, what looked like a fun book that, like Huck Finn that pretends to have no motive, moral or plot, this one too clearly has purpose. By penalizing you for not being adventurous and rewarding you for becoming more so, the book intends to make you more adventurous. It’s didactic: it has a purpose. Like most improvisations, appearing to have no motive or moral makes us trust the author, whose perfectly benign motive and moral is to make us develop our “numerous talents” and “enormous intelligence.” The mad genius of improv comedy Del Close urged his followers “to treat your audience as poets and geniuses and they will rise to the occasion.” Montgomery means to do the same.
Unspoken but deeply inscribed in the form, the call to adventure also seeks to make us more adventurous: Open yourself to life. No wonder they appealed to timid, reluctant readers’ parents. Life will be full of dead ends. This is the spirit you will need to get through them to discover life’s many offerings.
Luke, trust your feelings.
Contingency and Immigration
In the Choose books, as in life, everything is contingent. No character is an absolute. We are timid one moment and brave the next. Having been timid, given another chance, we can behave like Luke Skywalker. What we see through the lens of the character that possesses us in the moment is contingent. It's character-in-the-moment that shapes everything to its whim.
Similarly, the first thing that immigrants learn when they cross the border is the rule of contingency. Nothing is absolute. What was there un perro is here a dog. What from over there looked like the land of freedom, once arrived is a land of ICE and jail time.
That no doubt is often troubling, but it is also freeing. It is a life lesson we all must learn, that truth and meaning are contextual. Often what you see is determined by how you look at it. For, as the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus explained, “it is not things that trouble us, but our judgments about things” (Epictetus, Enchiridion). Because we can control our judgments, the quality of our life is within our control.
Contingency and framing is a lesson science finally learned when it realized that light is a particle if you run one experiment, a wave if you run another. Is light a particle or a wave? The answer of modern science: Yes, and…
No doubt for many immigrants contingency creates cognitive dissonance. It’s just plain crazy making. But for the happy few who grow into the double vision contingency invites, understanding contingency energizes their way forward in their new land. It’s what makes America great: the double-visioned wisdom of its immigrants. As Thoreau wrote in Walden, “With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense.”
Contingency and the Election
Nothing is more contingent than how the two tribes that make up present day America frame the two candidates in the 2024 election.
To one tribe, Trump is genuine, a truth-teller who tells it like it is. Harris is inept and lacking experience, a lifelong politician who’s helped Biden destroy the economy and has no plan to fix it. Trump is funny; Harris laughs too much.
To the other tribe, Harris is the most accomplished and experienced candidate in history—D.A., Attorney General, Senator, Vice President. The economy is improving and Harris has a plan to rebuild the middle class. Trump is a buffoon, a malignant narcissist, and a compulsive liar. Harris’ laugh has returned perspective and joy to American politics.
Here’s another thing. As Sarah Matthews, Deputy White House Press Secretary under Trump who resigned after January 6 and is now a Harris supporter, argued on MSNBC,
You’re never going to shame people out of their beliefs. Hillary Clinton made the comment about basket of deplorables. I don't know if that's the right approach. I think that in her 60 Minutes interview this past Sunday the Vice President was asked about this and she had a really good response about how there is more that unites us than divides us. That message rings true. We need to reach out to these people with compassion and understanding. (Deadline White House, October 11, 2024)
There are in each of us many characters who emerge in response to the moment, to the frames we activate or that activate us. But there is also in each of us an abiding Character, what Jung called the Self, the unification of consciousness and unconsciousness in a person that represents the psyche as a whole. Beneath the tribal divide there is more that unites us than divides us.
An archetypal psychologist, Jung presents this paradox, that beneath the many archetypal characters that seize us in our daily lives is our abiding Character. The diverse archetypes’ dynamic purpose as they seize our consciousness and direct our behavior is to lead us in an ongoing quest to uncover our true Character, our unified Self.
As Liz Cheney reminds us, “The Character [I’ve added the capital] of our leaders matters. We need to remember John Adams’ prayer that ‘none but honest and wise’ individuals should ever be president.”
Trump frames the American experience as carnage. Harris frames the American experiment as rich in possibility.
At wits end when they come, desperate, willing to leave behind the familiar and loved ones, the immigrants who build and built America choose and chose an adventure filled with promise.
Which adventure will you choose?
