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Friday
The recent New Yorker has an article—”The Tyranny of the Tale”—on the way that story telling is being sold as “the solution to everything.” Like Peter Brooks in Seduced by Story: The Uses and Abuses of Fiction, about which I’ve written multiple posts, Parul Sehgal notes, while storytelling is often touted as a powerful change agent, often it can work as a cage.
His complaint appears to be that “story supremacists” don’t acknowledge the downside. Instead, he says, they say we must “be spoken to in story” for the sake of “comprehension and care.” By using this tool, these advocates say, we can save “wildlife, water, conservatism, your business, our streets, newspapers, medicine, the movies, San Francisco, and meaning itself.”
Story, Sehgal continues, “has elbowed out everything else, from the lyric to the logical argument.” He draws on various academics that I have written about in the past (Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens, Jonathan Gottschall in The Storytelling Animal) as he surveys the claims:
All sorts of studies are fanned out in defense: we are persuaded more by story than by statistics; we recall facts longer if they are embedded in narrative; stories boost production of cortisol (encouraging attentiveness) and oxytocin (encouraging connection). We are pattern-seeking, meaning-making creatures, who project our narrative needs upon the world.
For Sehgal, this is a problem. For instance, the “unruliness of life” is “ill-served by story and its coercive resolution” because, by forcing reality into our storytelling agendas, we miss much. He cites Plato’s suspicion about story (I’ve also written about this), how it seduces us away from reason. For instance, Sehgal says, story supremacists may stress the importance of religious narratives but, in doing so, they miss the other ways that sacred texts communicate. For instance, “Religious texts were delivered as often in riddles as in parables; much of the Quran is non-narrative.”
And then there’s this:
Classics of ancient literature do not always evince story in a conventional sense: Gilgamesh is woven out of speeches; Beowulf scarcely has a causal plot. For centuries, Scheherazade’s stories, collected as The Arabian Nights were excluded from the canon of Arabic literature precisely because they were stories, classified as khurafa—fantasies that were fit only for women and children, that sat in the shadow of poetry, the revered genre of the time.
It is here where we begin to see the problem with Sehgal’s argument. First, I’ve never once met anyone who said that Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and Arabian Nights are not stories, whatever else they might be. The authors he cites approvingly–he mentions Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan, Muriel Spark, and practitioners of the nouveau roman (say, Alain Robbe Grillet)—are all, at one level or another, storytellers. It is in Sehgal’s use of the qualifier “conventional sense” that we can see where he has gone astray: he is conflating all narrative, from great literature to simple “problem presented-problem solved” stories. Just because stories have multiple dimensions to them doesn’t mean they aren’t stories.
Take Beowulf, for instance, which not only contains multiple stories but even features bards telling stories, along with the stories they tell. True, the epic sometimes jumps around and can seem disjointed. For instance, we have the story of the last veteran, then we jump to the dragon moving into his funeral barrow, then we learn that the dragon has been roused to anger upon having had a cup stolen, then we jump to its burning down Beowulf’s hall, then we see Beowulf looking back and seeing his life as one meaningless death after another (with each death presented as a story), then he is fighting the dragon. So okay, this isn’t a straightforward narrative. But the whole coheres when you realize that the storyteller is grappling with the problem of Beowulf getting old and in danger of becoming a dragon. The story, one realizes, is not unlike the story of King Lear, who at one point warns, “Come not between a dragon and his wrath.”
Beowulf is a complex story while the problems with story that Sehgal points to are those associated with predictable, formulaic, and one-dimensional stories. And it’s true that such stories can be very damaging indeed. Demagogues, for instance, have always used stories to get their way. Donald Trump’s story is always a variation of “X is trying to victimize me.” Mein Kampf is Hitler’s life told as a story. Boring and predictable though such stories may be, for narcissists they never get old. But that doesn’t mean they should be lumped in with all stories.
Sehgal also makes the mistake of thinking that only 20th story authors have become suspicious of story. But from the novel’s very beginnings in the 17th century, authors have probed the nature of narrative. Cervantes gives us a hero crazed by story (1605) and then, in the second volume (1615), introduces characters who have read the first volume and are interacting with Quixote and Sancho Panza with that knowledge. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) is essentially a novel about someone reflecting on how to tell his story, and Henry Fielding spends the introductions to the 18 books of Tom Jones (1748) exploring what exactly he as a novelist is up to. And as for straying from straightforward plot, a novel like Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) at one point gives us three different price structures for pawning off one’s baby. (Moll selects option #2.)
I also take issue with Sehgal separating story from other ways of conveying truth. Every form of writing, even the most fact-based and scientific, has a story to it. When I was running a summer faculty writing group at my old college, which I did for a number of years, my question to my fellow writers was always, “what’s the story of this piece?” I saw colleagues in psychology, philosophy, religious studies, history, math and other subjects recognize that thinking of their research in terms of storytelling gave them ways of organizing their material. They usually didn’t foreground the story, instead presenting their data points in ways that were appropriate to their field. Still, they found that seeing their project as a narrative was wonderfully clarifying.
It’s true, as Sehgal and Brooks note, that narrative can be abused. This is true of anything that is powerful, including religion, love, marriage, the law, etc. Great stories take us into deep places while shallow stories can do considerable damage.
So the problem is not that story is omnipresent. That has always been true. The problem lies in distinguishing between stories that reveal truth and those that aim to deceive and harm. A literary education helps students tell the difference.
Additional thought: Deepjeet, a longtime reader, responded to this post with the following useful comment:
My opinion is this – storytelling is being used as a panacea to all problems. I work in startups where story telling is being used as a replacement for lousy business models. It’s like Arabian nights where everyday CEO spins a yard to live another day. However the precaution is also in a story – that of the boy who cried wolf many times only to be stranded when he really needed help.
I absolutely love the application of Scheherazade, who in this scenario becomes an incessant spinner of bullshit. This makes me realize that the New Yorker article didn’t go far enough in showing the various ways that storytelling can be abused. But as Deepjeet notes, storytelling can also function as a corrective. Aesop is one of the many storytellers who can hold us to account in such instances. To cite another at random, King Lear shows us the disasters that can befall us when we allow self-indulgent, wish-fulfilling narratives to guide our political decisions.