Raid On Local Postmodernist Reveals Stash Of Metanarratives

Early yesterday morning, Police stormed the house of local postmodernist John Man. After wading through his dangerously deconstructed living room and three-walled kitchen, they chanced upon a secret underground lair full of pure, high grade metanarratives.

Detective Fred McNabsky was astounded by the discovery. “There were so many metanarratives lying around that I could hardly tell what was objectively true and what was merely a universalised interpretation of social, cultural, and historical phenomena projected with highly effective symbolic artifice and self-validating grandeur onto otherwise deeply flawed human behaviour,” he said. “You know?”

Police estimate that the street value of the metanarrative stash could be in the trillions. “We can’t let these fall into the wrong hands,” he said. “If a government were to get hold of even one of these things, who knows what sort of crazy, warmongering nonsense might they be able to justify?”

Bob Guy, a trainee detective who attended the raid, agreed. “Yeah, I was only looking at them for a few minutes before I found myself planning a democratic rebellion in a middle-eastern country,” he said. “When I got home I tried to wash all traces of them off my hands. There I was, standing at the wash basin screaming “out, damned totalising schema, out, I say!” But they just wouldn’t go.”

As the metanarratives were being confiscated Man tried to explain why had so many of them, but he soon found it very difficult to come up with a convincing story. “Now that they are gone,” he said, “I don’t know how to imbue my base urges with inspiringly mythical significance. It sort of seems like I’ve just made some really crappy decisions, and that’s not great.”

He now he says he is looking forward to a time when some other visionary concept comes along which he can use to instil sense of importance into any random thing that ever happens. “The new iPhone will be out soon,” he said, “and that is great.”