Over a hundred and fifty years ago a little boy crept into a church to hear the organist practice and was moved to tears by the beauty of the music. This boy, who grew up to be none other than the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, observed that we moderns tend to think of stories, and the arts generally, as mere entertainment — an “easily dispensable tinkle of bells next to the ‘seriousness of life’.” From kindergarten through grad school we are encouraged to “State the facts!”, “Crunch the numbers!, “Get to the point!” Who has time to weep over the beauty of a painting or a song? What’s the point?
Are novels even read in their entirety any more in school? Or are they unflinchingly and exclusively dissected into passages, chosen for “relevance” or lessons on grammar and syntax? And fairy tales and songs, which have long been a staple of early childhood education, have been increasingly shunted aside in favor of math and reading worksheets and the serious business of standardized tests.
For modern-day peddlers of “knowledge,” stories are at most simply stepping stones to what’s important, like getting into the right college or landing the right job.
And what would be wrong with that? Do stories matter?
Lovers of stories everywhere have been saying so for a long time. And now literature’s more practical sibling, science, is catching up to speed. What’s more, stories may be integral to our mental health, emotional well-being, and capacity for cultivating healthy relationships, such as love, friendship, and political community.
A good story draws us in with an irresistible force.
Why are Stories so Powerful?
Once upon a time two families opposed the marriage of two teenage lovers and they both died. The end.
None but the high school student who has had the love of learning sucked out of him or her by something that passes for an education only in name would say, “Oh good, now that I know what happened, I don’t have to read it.”
Of course, no one reads Romeo and Juliet for the plot. Unlike a trashy mystery novel, we aren’t reading to find out the facts about what happened. We all know they die in a tragic double suicide. So why do stories have such power over us? Even today, they continually draw us in.
Discovering the facts — who did what when, where, why, and how —is of course only a part of why we read. To begin to understand the power of story, we have to first grasp how important story has been for humanity itself.
Our cavalier disregard of stories and the arts in general is an extremely recent development in the history of the human species. Stories, as far as we know, have been around for as long as human beings have existed.
The oldest known story was discovered just two years ago in central Indonesia. Dating from at least 43,900 years ago, these cave paintings depict a hunting scene with humanoid figures who have animal-like features.[1] Why would our ancient fore-bearers, who must have been busy with the demands of food, shelter, and just not dying from day to day, take the time to paint the ceilings and walls of their caves?
As the American fantasy and science fiction author Ursula Le Guin observes,
“The story — from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace — is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind for the purpose of understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”
The power of story for developing our understanding is captured more bluntly by the always intrepid Jane Austen:
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
So how did story bring us from brute caveman to human being? In Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence, author Lisa Cron explains
“Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution — more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to. Story is what enabled us to imagine what might happen to us in the future, and so prepare for it — a feat no other species can lay claim to. Story is what makes us human, not just metaphorically but literally. Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience reveal that our brain is hardwired to respond to story; the pleasure we derive from a tale well told is nature’s way of seducing us into paying attention to it.”
Initially, it is theorized that humans told stories to pass along helpful information. Stories about which berries to avoid, the potential dangers of dark caves, which animals to hunt and so on.
But our human capacity to imagine the future also comes with an awareness of our inevitable demise. Which raises the question, what makes life worth living? What should we hang on to in life? And why should we hang on to life itself?
How Stories Connect Us
One of the greatest mythmakers, the ancient Greek poet Homer, began to weave an answer to these questions with his epic poem, the Iliad. The story begins with insults, rage, lust, and revenge, which are threatening to dissolve the tribal world of the early Greeks and Trojans into chaos. Two developments bring the return of cosmos, which in the Greek view is a harmonious balance of the chaotic and orderly elements of the universe to form a whole.
The first development is that the great warrior Achilles’ withdrawal from the war (between the Greeks and the Trojans) over an insult to his honor threatens to bring down his entire army, and ultimately leads to the death of the only person he cares about, his best friend Patroclus. Confronted with the knowledge that he is personally responsible for his friend’s death on account of actions that he freely willed, the subsequent pain and guilt make him question whether his life is worth living.
Achilles’ decision to live to avenge Patroclus’ death is a step towards restoring order, because rather than acting out of a completely self-interested desire to be recognized as the best, he is acting on behalf of another — to restore his dead friend’s honor by getting back at the man who killed him. Homer is teaching that complete self-absorption and selfishness are the greatest threat to human community and the cosmos itself.
What’s more, to get his revenge, Achilles has to keep on living. His life is given purpose. He has something to hold onto.
Revenge is of course in itself a great cause of chaos however. Achilles gets his desire, but not before he leaves a wake of bloody destruction in his path, and only to find it doesn’t make him feel better. His friend is still dead. He imagined he would feel better after taking revenge, but the reality is that his friend is dead, and nothing can bring him back.
The balance within the Greek universe is only (tenuously) restored when Achilles fully recognizes his humanity. The king of the enemy army sneaks into Achilles’ camp to get back the body of his dead son, whom Achilles has killed, desecrated, and maimed. Rather than give in to his overwhelming anger at the sight of his enemy and lash out, Achilles, wiser from having suffered intense personal loss and discovered individual responsibility, sees the king as a fellow human being.
The enemy king, Achilles can now perceive, is a father, weeping over his lost son, just as Achilles’ father will weep over his soon to be lost son. The two weep together, and Achilles returns the son’s body.
So for Homer, what is worth hanging onto in this life? Each other, because we all share in common loss, suffering, and eventual death. Achilles has discovered empathy, and with the ability to imagine ourselves in another’s shoes —even when that ‘other’ happens to be our greatest enemy — comes a shared sense of what it is to be human that binds us together, rather than tearing us apart.
The second development that brings order to a chaotic universe and heaves us back in the direction of balance is that Homer, the poet, uses story to cultivate the empathic imagination of his audience. We can imagine ourselves as Achilles, as Patroclus, as the enemy king, as we transcend the mentalities of me-versus-the-world and us-versus-them. And we can draw the circle ever wider, towards humanity itself.
How Stories Make Us Human
Empathy might be the beginning of one aspect of the human story, but it is not the end. Our imagination can unleash our capacities for being humane, but it will only truly connect us to one another if we are not inventing mere fictions about those we love, are friends with, and live in political communities with.
Sometimes we get so carried away by our imaginations that we don’t even really see the people around us. Instead, we see them through a filter of our own creation. Who hasn’t ever heard from a friend or loved one, “You’re not listening to me…”? We get ourselves into all sorts of conflict and unhealthy patterns, with the result that everyone involved begins to suffer. Rather than calmly accepting a reality different from our own experiences, thoughts and imaginings, we can lash out and try to force the world to conform to our inventions.
Michel Houellebecq in his 90s novel, Whatever, describes a main character who is so divorced from his daily experiences and lost in his own abstractions that he loses his car, advocates a murder, and suffers a suicidal malaise that leads to a near complete mental breakdown. The book is a great warning to us of what we risk losing when our imaginations and our thoughts are no longer grounded in the truth of experience or reality itself.
So how can we get out of our own stories and abstractions? How is fiction connected to truth?
First, by constant exposure, from a young age, to stories that show us others who are different from ourselves but who we can nonetheless empathize with. When we encounter a diversity of people who don’t match our expectations of how we think the world ought to be, we will be less likely to perceive them as an existential threat to our entire worldview. As a result, we won’t get so angry or threatened by different people and views in real life. Moreover, we can grow in personal responsibility by experiencing, indirectly, the consequences of a diversity of actions that have a reference to real life.
Second, we need to maintain the distinction between stories and truth. In recent decades, a theory of literature called “post-modernism” has arisen which states that there is no distinction between story and truth, and that all of life is a story. “Write the story of your own life!”, the post-modern theorist admonishes.
It sounds nice. But if there’s no distinction between reality and fiction, there’s nothing to ground our powerful imaginations and, like Achilles, we risk hurting our relationships and ourselves, leaving a path of destruction behind us as we each attempt to force the world to conform to our imagined reality. And that, to me at least, seems like a sure path to chaos. Between lovers, between friends, and between the members of our communities.
Instead, a good story will bring us back to our true selves, and what we hold in common, much as mindfulness “focuses one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.”[2]
A good story isn’t all tinsel and froth. It shows us the genuine comedy and tragedy of life, without driving us to anarchic despair or a militant desire to control the world around us.
A good story is a human story, with all of its real flaws, idealized perfections and incompleteness, miraculously drawn together into a cosmic whole.
So if you’ve been feeling like the world has fallen apart, don’t despair. And don’t go out and try to remake it in your own image, like a controlling partner, in a misguided attempt to restore a sense of order at any cost.
Instead, pick up a book, or tell a story. Discover a cosmic whole, and find your place within it.
Then go and make a friend, and talk about that story. As the ancient philosopher Socrates said, the best life for a human being is talking about good books with friends. It’s what we were born for. Our brains are literally wired for it.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/science/cave-art-indonesia.html
[2] https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/mindfulness