A Brief Meditation on Story

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We are wired for stories, to make them, to know them, and to be formed by them. Story is everywhere, and is always the way out for meaning, especially the Ultimate Meaning, so that we may, though dimly, know Him who composes the tale, its main Character, and the One who continues to tell it.

“Once Upon a Time.” “What happens next?” “How does it end?” “I wandered lonely as a cloud” and…? J.R.R. Tolkien has told us that story-writing is sub-creation; that is, that we are imitating the original Creator when we make up stories and so must be very careful indeed. (Tolkien was on to something bigger than he knew, I think. We shall see.) When one searches the Web for ‘story’ a carload of stories comes up, but that’s not the case with ‘narrative’. With that… theory, including the grotesque ‘narratology’, appears.

In the beginning—now, here comes a story, even if not the story—I read them and wanted to write them. Everyone else wants them, too, no exceptions. I bathed in them: movies, print, television (including news ‘stories’, as any reporter will avow), and before that on the radio: Inner Sanctum, the Shadow, Straight Arrow (though never those hamster wheels known as soap operas, except for the fifteen-minute ones that came on at noon, like Stella Dallas, listening with my grandmother, who would never miss “her stories”).

I traveled from Chuck Berry’s Maybeline motorvatin’ over the hill in her Coup deVille to Homer. Of course, composing stories, too, is inevitable. We all do it, making up narratives for ourselves. (But we must take care to make good ones. Bad ones often lead to ruin.) Then, when I learned the concept ‘teleology’, the penny dropped, though slowly.

I saw an astonishing spectrum of stories. At the two ends are myths and fabliaux. The former are timeless, the latter very much of their time, 12^th and 13^th century France. On the former there is an overabundance of literature, from Frye, to Campbell, to Jung, Frazer and Eliade, among so many others—grand and marked by awe; on the latter barely anything, perhaps because the fabliaux are very often very indecent, both in plot and language. (Think Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale—on steroids.) Both ends are still read, and the spectrum is thick. All wars are stories, as are all boxing matches and ballgames, from rounds and innings to every punch and pitch. In certain regions, like courtrooms and politics, ‘narratives’ must be woven and controlled.

I thought, “Without stories, would time exist, or, at least, would we have any sense of it?” I came to see that music, the embodiment of time, moves like a story, with its melodic and harmonic contrasts, its structured internal conversations among voices and instruments, and its resolutions; and visual art, too, with shapes and colors drawing the eye, and its iconography often telling a tale. In short, stories offer conflict, from simple figure-ground, to soft and hard contrast to raw aggression. (My friend Emily, a singer, allows that depression occurs when a person believes he or she has no more story.) Oh, and gossip. Story is everywhere and always is the way out for meaning.

Many authors, from Stephen King to the Peruvian master Julio Ramon Ribeyro have sought to instruct us in the craft. The latter lists ten points (in his introduction to his collection La palabra del mudo). Among these are the following (which we will re-visit): 1. the story must entertain, move, intrigue or surprise. If none of these is present there is not story; 2. it must show, not tell; 3. characters must exist in a situation that compels a choice that puts their destiny in play; 4. the story must lead inevitably to an unwinding which, if unacceptable to the reader, is the mark of a failure. As for plot, one author tells us that there are seven basic plots, another has said there are two, “a stranger rides into town,” “a stranger rides out of town.”

The neatest advice, though, is from Quentin Tarantino. He wraps up the point nicely in his Reservoir Dogs. There the actor Tim Roth plays a cop who is to go undercover with a gang about to pull a heist. The problem, though, is that he’s never been undercover. So he visits a veteran sergeant who gives him the text of a cover story (for when he auditions to join the gang) and tells him to learn it and to come back in a week, which he does. Alas, he’s learned the text verbatim, which drives the older cop nuts. “You don’t recite it!” he shouts. “What you do is know the story, put in lifelike details, and tell it like you lived it.” (This, too, will pop up again.)

And yet… and yet that leaves out the frisson, or if not the frisson then the taste, of the tale. Certainly the grip of plot can matter, but it matters above all in melodrama, where menace, close calls, impending doom, and death are the point. They are ‘substitutable’: The young maid approaching the darkened door at the top of the stairs could easily be the nubile girlfriend approaching that cabin in the woods. In neither is there a gripping and distinctive qualia, an adjectival grip that comes, say, from it being a wolf – not a bear or a lion but a wolf—that is stalking Litte Red Riding Hood. This is what C.S. Lewis has called the kappa element in fiction,” which he developed in his seminal essay “On Stories.”

What often matters most, he writes, is the sheer quiddity of a thing. Fear is one thing, fear of giants quite something else; being about to be killed, one thing, killed by ‘Red Indians’ something else, the swiping tomahawk being more dreadful than a thrusting knife. Moreover, in many stories, “it is the quality of unexpectedness, not the fact that delights us.” And in the best stories both awe and bewilderment can co-exist, showing us “what reality may well be like at some more central region.” This element of qualia—not something hidden or covert but a taste acting supra-intelletually—is what the kappa element is.

To be stories at all they must be stories of events; but it must be understood that this series—the plot as we call it—is only really a net whereby to catch something else. The real theme may be, and perhaps actually is, something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state or quality.

That may be the key to their ubiquitous, unfailing, everlasting allure.

Or the key may lie in the making of a journey, one we must make if we are to discern the answer to Why, or How, or Who, along the way experiencing, never merely a proposition but a re-configuring of some sort, the process of making dynamic connections, no matter that they seem either trivial, ephemeral, tenuous, or downright invented.

Consider Freud’s tortured narrative from Civlization and Its Discontents, one upon which his entire argument rests:

[Aggressiveness] reigned almost without limit in primitive times… and it already shows itself in the nursery… it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people…. At that time [guilt] is the immediate expression of fear of the external authority, a recognition of the tension between the ego and that authority…. In the same way, indeed, the primal father did not attain divinity until long after he had met his death by violence.

Certainly, at our late age, picking on Freud is like plucking low-hanging fruit. Still, note the contrast between the sweep of his conclusions and the total absence of any evidence. And yet the book is celebrated and taught, such is the power of story, especially when it claims explanatory status and is told with conviction. Woe unto that poor primal father, about whom we know nothing, or nearly nothing.

That ‘nearly’ is the basis for the sharp contrast with Freud of G.K. Chesterton’s wondering about that same man, in The Everlasting Man. He asks, How can a scientist say they wore no clothes? Or that he beat his wife, or his son? How to talk about the history of pre-historic Man when he is—pre-historic? “We do know,” Chesterton says, “that humanity was before history,” but not before art. “The man left a picture of a reindeer [and] the art he did practice was quite artistic….. In short, the prehistoric period need not mean the primitive period, in the sense of the barbaric or bestial period.” We know that about this man.

In his very different view, Chesterton concludes the obvious: Man is a qualitatively different animal. “A monkey does not draw clumsily and a man cleverly; a monkey does not begin the art of representation and a man carry it to perfection…. A Line of some kind is crossed before the first faint line can begin.” And he does not stop there. He cites a professor who claims the drawings have no religious significance, and replies,

I can hardly imagine a thinner thread of argument than this which recon- structs he very inmost moods of the pre-historic mind from the fact that  somebody who has scrawled a few sketches on a rock, from what motive we do not know, for what purpose we do not know, acting under what customs or conventions we do not know, may possibly have found it easier to draw reindeer that to draw religion.

In short, Chesterton, a supremely accomplished story-teller, here refuses, for lack of evidence, to tell a story, although, as he goes on to answer H.G. Wells’ Outline of History, he will weave a tale, along the way pointing out that one cannot have an outline without lines—the erasure of which is Wells’ flat-line materialist project, a simplification, like Freud’s.

Clearly I am imputing a teleological explanation for our story-wiring, a wiring that makes us receptive of how Creation is working (indeed, how it is designed to work). In that light regard how the philosopher Owen Barfield approaches our story—the story we are in—arguing for the Incarnation philologically, or, more precisely, etymologically, the story of words. Would that I could do justice to his combination of conversational tone and argumentative rigor in “Philology and the Incarnation.”

There he traces the movement of the meanings of words. We began, he says, to describe interior states (e.g. our ‘spirit’) by way of outward phenomena (‘spirit’ having meant ‘wind’). Then, at a certain point, that incoming tide began to withdraw. What was incoming became outgoing, as was the case with ‘logos’ as used by, say Plato and Aristotle, on the one hand, then, around the first century A.D., by St. John in his gospel.

This was the moment at which there was consummated that age-long process of contraction of the immaterial qualities of the cosmos into a human center, into an inner world, which had made possible the development of an immaterial language. This, therefore, was the moment in which his true selfhood, his spiritual selfhood, entered into the body of man. Casting about for a word to denote that moment, what one would [one] be likely to choose? I think he would be almost obliged to choose the word incarnation, the entering into the body, the entering into the flesh. [That man, Barfield continues} strove to reverse the direction of… thought—for the word metanoia, which is translated “repentance” also means a reversal of the direction of the mind—he startled them and strove to reverse the direction of their thought by assuring them that ‘it is not that which cometh into a man which defileth him, but that which goeth out of him.’

Barfield concluded that, had he never heard of scripture but knew the evidence provided by the progress of words and diserned the direction of expression around the first century A.D., he would believe that a monumental drawing in of meaning and then its expulsion had been wrought, constituting a monumental change, a major evolution in human consciousness: just then, and the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity explains that change.

Scripture, though, tells the story differently. In Mere Christianity Lewis writes that God “selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was—that there was only one of Him. ” And then comes, not quite the denoument (that remains down the road) but the climax, the “real shock”as Lewis calls it:

Among those Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time…. What this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has never been uttered by human lips.

It seems to add up. Events that gain growing attention, a kappa element of mysterious promise, a protagonist coming to town as a stranger and (that same stranger) leaving as one, only more strangely than he arrived; one whose story is fairly simple yet filled with lifelike detail (both awesome and down-to-earth) and whose story is told by others as though they lived it, their hero claiming to be as qualitatively different from humanity as Chesterton’s caveman is from the apes (and also drawing a picture, though not on a cave wall), who is the figure standing out in against the ground, who is in stark contrast to all others, and who is victimized by stark aggression, and, especially, who indeed tells us What Happens Next….

Our story could have begun differently. Instead of “In the beginning” we might have had “Creation consists of three parts” (exposition), or “Behold the luminescence” (description), or even “Resolved: Out of sheer exuberant love the Almighty expressed the Heavens and the Earth” (argument). Instead we got a story (narration), and, with it, Time.

We see best, not with white on white or black on black, but with black on white. What is war? It is not peace, no matter what Big Brother dictates. Or must we be like the fish who does not understand wetness, because we are on the inside—even though we have been given signs from outside the story? Must we think that because we can seek out stories that we are not therefore in a story?

Rather—here, finally, is our teleology—we are wired for stories, to make them, to know them, and to be formed by them. Story is everywhere, and is always the way out for meaning, especially the Ultimate Meaning, so that we may, though dimly, know Him who composes the tale, its main Character, and the One who continues to tell it.

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The featured image is “Interesting Story” (1898) Laura Muntz Lyall, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.