Perhaps there is a biological urgency in our need for stories. Every day we consume books and films, soap operas and anecdotes.1 Every night we dream - reshaping fragments of our lives, escaping reason and issuing warnings to our egos. To tell a story is to be human.
This impulse is in constant tension with the otherwise typically mundane nature of our daily actions. Our lives spool out meaninglessly until we recast them as a series of discrete events in which we are heroes or victims. John le Carré describes just how central this is to the process of storytelling:
The disciplines of storytelling require that I shape, out of the monotony and everyday life of espionage, something that has a beginning, a middle and an end. That's already contrary to the reality ... I have to introduce levels of moral doubt, self-doubt, which may not pertain. I mean a guy who just takes 10,000 bucks to go and do something probably is not asking whether he can reconcile this to his maker. But in my books, he has to.
... nothing that I write is authentic. It is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Yet I am treated by the media as though I wrote espionage handbooks. I am regarded as a sage on every spy case from the double-agent Judas to your wretched Mr. Aldrich Ames.
And to a point I am flattered that my fabulations are taken so seriously. Yet I also despise myself in the fake role of guru, since it bears no relation to who I am or what I do. Artists, in my experience, have very little centre. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.2
The conspiratorial everyday world that le Carré refers to is one that thrives on artifice or, as Oscar Wilde explains it in The Decay of Lying, 'art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth'. In defence of this argument Wilde cites the example of Japan, a country that does not exist:
Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists ... The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention.3
Wilde touches on a sore point here regarding the nature of artifice. While storytelling has a long history, not everyone has felt comfortable with the fact that it involves deception. As far back as Plato it was felt that artists and writers were suspect for this very reason and even early novelists such as John Bunyan worried that the fictional story of a pilgrim's progress might not be as moral as a parable from Christ.4
With the rise of realism and the infectious spread of journalistic reporting, storytelling suddenly began to look old-fashioned and slightly bogus. Modernists brought an almost scientific air to their attempts to represent reality while, in art, narrative in painting and the spatial fictions of the frame were also being questioned. Walter Benjamin, the human antenna for a new culture, marked the passing of storytelling, seeing its' fate intrinsically linked to the rise of broadcast news:
Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet ... no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information ... Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it ... The most extraordinary things, marvellous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.5
Benjamin stresses the need for economy in narrative, paring away elements of explanation that will limit the potential interpretations of the story. The less explanation, the more ambiguity. This, thought Benjamin, would give a story 'germinative power', allowing it to generate new meanings across different centuries and different cultures.
Likewise, Sigmund Freud believed that the stories we create in our sleep are condensed after waking, representing only fragments of the complete dream and leaving us with ambiguous narratives that we can interpret in a multitude of ways:
The first thing that becomes clear to anyone who compares the dream-content with the dream-thoughts is that a work of condensation on a large scale has been carried out. Dream are brief, meagre and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream-thoughts. If a dream is written out it may perhaps fill half a page. The analysis setting out the dream-thoughts underlying it may occupy six, eight or a dozen times as much space.6
Freud proceeds from this point to interpret his own 'Dream of the Botanical Monograph' but not before warning that it is 'never possible to be sure that a dream has been completely interpreted'.
This economy of narrative and the infinite interpretations that it spawns may have a practical function in our lives. The multiple readings of any given situation help to broaden our understanding of ourselves, our own moral and social boundaries and the alternative possibilities available. Every story is an experiment: it enables us to see through another's eyes, to vicariously experience another way of life or a previously unimaginable situation. The numerous options confirm the relativity of every event and encourages us to question the certainties we live by - this is perhaps why would-be lawmakers like Plato distrust art.
The power of the story depends on the imagination of the reader to ignite it. Readers consider the narrative within the context of their own individual experiences and the rules of the language and genre in which it is presented. A researcher in cognitive studies, Merlin C. Wittrock, describes the process as follows:
To comprehend a text we not only read it, in the nominal sense of the word, we construct a meaning for it ... readers attend to the text. They create images and verbal transformations to represent its meaning. Most impressively, they generate meaning as they read by constructing relations between their knowledge, their memories of experience, and the written sentences, paragraphs and passages ... reading is not an idiosyncratic, anarchic phenomenon. But neither is it a monolithic, unitary process where only one meaning is correct. Instead, it is a generative process that reflects the reader's disciplined attempt to construct one or more meanings within the rules of language.
Following the old adage that 'language is the dress of thought', it could be said that reading permits the exploration of alternative identities. The reader ('conspiratorial' as le Carré points out) can in the privacy of reading try on new thoughts or revel in disguise. Little has been written about this aspect of reading and cognitive research has yet to explore what exactly occurs in the readers' minds when they 'lose themselves' in a book or identify with the hero or heroine of a story.
One parallel, though, might help to suggest an outline of the process. In Masquerade and Civilisation, the literary historian Terry Castle describes the rise of masquerade parties in eighteenth-century England. Introduced to the country by John James Heidegger, the masquerade required all guests to dress in a costume known as a 'domino' - a loose flowing cloak that enveloped the entire body. Topped off with a large mask, it was impossible to guess either the identity or the gender of any guest. To sustain the disguise, it was common to employ the 'masquerade squeak', a falsetto tone that also helped to efface the guests' sexual identity. Incognito, the masqueraders could roam the hall: lords and ladies could mingle with footmen and maids, and the traditional rules of sex and society were abandoned. Castle describes the vertiginous effects of this on the masqueraders' sense of self:
One became the other in an act of ecstatic impersonation. The true self remained elusive and inaccessible - illegible - within its fantastical encasements. The result was a material devaluation of unitary notions of the self...
Disguise, when unveiled, is perceived as profoundly anti-social; witness the persistent association between the mask and criminality, travesty and treachery. The cheek of the masquerade was that it both sanctioned such deceit and suffused it with a kind of euphoria. Blatantly, joyfully, masquerades subverted the myth of the legible body by sending false sartorial messages. The masquerade was a revelling in duplicity, a collective experiment - comical and arabesque - in semantic betrayal and violation of the sartorial contract.8
Reading a description of a masquerade was barely less exciting than attending the real thing and the actual process of reading a novel, for instance, reenacts a similar kind of impersonation when we experience the world vicariously through the medium of an author's characters.9
A story cultivates a state of uncertainty.10 Habitual notions of the self are suspended and the possibility of experiment becomes available. There is a sense of security in knowing a book can be abandoned, or a film will finish at a specified time - the committment to a story is not irrevocable. The narrative journey can be simply to pass the time but it may equally be instructive or transcendental. Every story, however, acknowledges the relativity of human experience.
Notes
1. The relationship of text, reading and writing to bodily memory is nicely encapsulated in a passage from A History of Reading (Flamingo, 1997, p.71) where Alberto Manguel describes a medieval Jewish tradition associated with the teaching of the Torah:
On the Feast of Shavuot, when Moses received the Torah from the hands of God, the boy about to be initiated was wrapped in a prayer shawl and taken by his father to the teacher. the teacher sat the boy on his lap and showed him a slate on which were written the Hebrew alphabet, a passge from the Scriptures and the words "May the Torah be you occupation." The teacher read out every word and the child repeated it. Then the slate was covered with honey and the child licked it, thereby bodily assimilating the holy words. Also, biblical verses were written on peeled hard-boiled eggs and on honey cakes, which the child would eat after reading the verses out loud to the teacher.
2. Andrew Ross, 'Master of the Secret World: John le Carré on deception,storytelling and American hubris', Interview, Salon, Oct. 21 1996,
http://www.salon.com/weekly/lecarre961021.html. and
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/lecarre/author.html. Taken from remarks made by John le
Carré to the Knopf Sales Force August 12, 1996.)
3. Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, in The Works of Oscar Wilde, Galley Press, 1987, p.927.
4. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, 1675. See Bunyan's introductory 'The Author's Apology for His Book' where he defends his use of fiction on the grounds that it springs from good intentions and that Christian teachings were also couched in rhetorical language:
Some said, JOHN, print it; others said, Not so;
Some said, It might do good; others said, No....
But must I needs want solidness, because
By metaphors I speak? Were not God's laws,
His gospel laws, in olden times held forth
By types, shadows, and metaphors?
5. Walter Benjamin, 'The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov', Illuminations, Pimlico, rpt. 1999 [1955], p.89. While Benjamin's analysis of the nature of broadcast news is accurate, it is possible to find examples of writers who have taken topical items and pared them back to create a story such as Nik Cohn in Yes We Have No (Vintage, 2000, p. 25) when he notes that
These are days filled with stirring tidings. A black gunman has painted himself white to avoid detection as he robs a NatWest bank in Croydon. A sudden outbreak of trolley rage in a Wakefield supermarket has left a customer spread-eagled and bleeding over the Mr Kipling cakes display. In Bristol a male model turned Ecstasy dealer is spared imprisonment when he burst into tears in the dock, claiming to be too pretty for jail. And in Selly Oak, an old folk's club, hoping for a lottery handout, has changed its name to the Gay Gnomes.
6. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Avon Books, rpt. 1965 [1900], p.313.
7. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading, Flamingo, 1997, pp. 38-39.
8. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilisation: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction, Methuen, 1986, pp. 4 + 57.
9. With the advent of internet the possibility of masquerade and impersonation reappears in the form of the 'avatar' - a digital construct that functions as a surrogate body in cyberspace. In Snow Crash (ROC, 1992, pp.33-34), Neal Stephenson describes the potential of the avatar in the future:
Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you're ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you'ver just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup...
Gustav Janouch, in Conversations with Kafka, (André Deutsch, 1971) provides us with a healthy reminder that vicarious living is not enough, recalling Kafka's comments that
A man can't, for instance, master his own experience through the medium of another personality. That is how the world is in relation to books. One tries to imprison life in a book, like a songbird in a cage, but it's no good.]
Finally, in Kieslowski on Kieslowski (Faber, 1993, pp. 35-36), the Polish filmmaker Krzystof Kieslowski points out that storytellers must comprehend their own lives before creating stories for others:
If you don't understand your own life, then I don't think you can understand the lives of other people. Philosophers know this. Social workers know this. But artists ought to know this too - at least those who tell stories. Maybe musicians don't need such an analysis, although I believe that composers do. Painters maybe less so. But it's absolutely necessary to those who tell stories about life: an authentic understanding of one's own life. By authentic I mean that it's not a public understanding, which I'll share with anybody. It's not for sale, and, in fact, you'll never detect it in my films. Some things you can find out very easily but you'll never understand how much the films I make or the stories I tell mean to me and why. You'll never find that out. I know it, but that knowledge is only for me.
10. In 336 PEK, Joao Penalva illustrates this quality of uncertainty in his retelling of a railway disaster at Lake Baikal. This is one of the best known stories associated with the lake and one brief version of it can be found online for instance in a tourist information guide called 'The Gem of Siberia':
The Trans-Siberian rail line reached Irkutsk in 1898. Between 1898 and 1905, trains traveled across the lake on the ferry "Baikal." In order to move troops across the lake during the Russo Japanese war in 1904, tracks were laid across the winter ice. This plan met with disaster when the first train broke through leaving a 12 mile hole in the ice. The Circum-Baikal railway was built in two years and ran from Port Baikal to Babushkin in order to avoid the necessity of crossing the lake. (http://www.mircorp.com/Baikal.html)
The narrator of 336 PEK recounts a slightly longer version of the same story which he had heard as a boy but he then goes on to say
It puzzled me then that the story of Prince Kilkhov's disaster was also told in a different way. some said that the locomotive sunk in a shallow part of the Baikal, that it was salvaged and that it ran for many years after between St Petersburg and Helsinki. So I asked my father which one was the true story. My Father said the disaster story was the true one. The Baikal is over 1km deep, one and a half at its deepest. There was no chance they could have salvaged that locomotive. And I asked my teacher and she said that the happy ending one was probably the true story. They wouldn't have invented that the locomotive had made regular trips between such big towns if it wasn't true. And I asked my mother and she said that sometimes there is no truth to these stories. Because as time passes people forget and become confused.