No More Stories

Our Stories and Our Lives

Why is talking about narrative so difficult? Why do we feel, as we try to do so, that we quickly sink into a quagmire from which it is impossible to escape? I think it has to do with the fact that narrative is inescapably bound up with our own lives. We live immersed in stories, making sense of our lives and even of individual episodes in them by means of the stories we tell both to ourselves and to others. Stories are as much part of us as our dreams.

This is not the case with other art forms. Poetry, painting, sculpture, music and dance may of course deploy stories to achieve their ends, but the crucial fact is that they are clearly demarcated off from life. They are outside us. They are made. But doesn’t much poetry, from the Odyssey to the work of Robert Frost, also consist of stories? You may ask. Yes indeed, but the fact that these stories are in verse immediately puts them on a different footing from prose narratives, for each time we move from one line to the next we are reminded that what we are reading is something that has been constructed, composed; whereas one of the slippery things about prose narratives is that not only is it easy to forget that they are made, but that they seem to blur the boundaries between inside and outside, between dream, fantasy and reality. We ‘lose ourselves’ in a novel as we lose ourselves in a daydream, but never in a narrative poem: the rhythm keeps reminding us of the maker, even in the most casual of poems, such as Byron’s Don Juan.

There are in our modern Western world plenty of people ready to tell us that we all have one story inside us and that they can (for a fee) help us bring that story out into the open. But think about it for a moment. Do we not tell one story about ourselves to our doctor? Another to the police? Yet another to our partners and children? Moreover, could it not be, as Freud suggests, that we often tell stories – to ourselves and to others – as a way of avoiding scrutiny – both our own and others’? Kafka, who not only wrote some of the greatest stories we have but also thought intensely about stories and story-telling, towards the end of his brief life came to think that telling stories, writing stories, was really nothing but a way of avoiding facing up to his own death.

Whatever we think about this (and it’s a difficult thought to absorb), it is clear that the main difficulty we encounter in trying to talk about stories is that they – both in the writing and the reading – are much more deeply entwined with our lives and with all the swirl of thoughts we have, from adolescence on, about what it means to be ourselves and what it means to be alive. Unless we recognise this, we will make no headway in understanding them. We may understand this story or that, this novel or that, but when it comes to the question of what stories are, what stories do, we are at a loss.

Novel and Story

Everyone knows Oscar Wilde’s quip: ‘Anyone can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.’ Wilde wrote this in 1891, in an essay interestingly called ‘The Critic as Artist’. The essay – it is in two parts and takes up some sixty pages in my edition – is full of Wilde’s wit and fondness for paradox, and in the end is disappointingly thin. It does, though, make one very important point, highlighted in the title: the artist today needs the critical spirit as much as the spirit of invention. Wilde makes the point succinctly here: practitioners of the popular form of the three-volume novel only need one thing: a complete blindness as to what is still possible in the form they have chosen and a complete ignorance of how life is lived. And things haven’t much changed since 1891. We can all substitute contemporary equivalents of the three-volume novel and its practitioners, though we will each include slightly different examples.

Wilde returned to the theme in The Importance of Being Ernest:

Miss Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.

Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.

Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

There is much to ponder here. Why does a happy ending so depress Cecily? Why do we laugh at the confidence of Miss Prism’s assertion? And then there is the deeper question raised by Wilde, whether any kind of fiction writing is not the product of naivety and a burying of the head in the sand.

We need to distinguish what I have so far elided: stories and novels. Humans are story-telling animals and there have no doubt been stories told around the camp fire and by mothers and grandmothers to children and grandchildren from time immemorial. The novel, on the other hand, is a modern form, coterminous with the Renaissance and its emphasis on individuality, the Reformation and the crisis of authority it both embodied and precipitated, and the emergence of print. No one has explored the difference better than Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Storyteller’. In fact his argument is founded on the proposition that the decline of storytelling is inextricably linked to the rise of the novel, and that ‘the dissemination of the novel became possible only with the invention of printing’.

‘What can be handed on orally,’ he suggests, ‘is of a different kind from what constitutes the stock in trade of the novel.’ And he adds:

What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature – the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella – is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular. The storyteller takes what he tells from experience – his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounselled and cannot counsel others.