Over at his blog, Nathan Bransford (Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapow) presents a common argument for why narrative writers create stories. Excerpts:Our entire worldview and memories are created out of our stories. Two people can witness the same event, process and interpret it completely differently and reach completely different conclusions about what just happened. And that's before the fluid and corrosive effects of memory take hold. The reality of the actual event, even if it was recorded on film, blurs into the past. In its place: Stories, our way of interpreting what we have seen, which is all we have to make sense of what passes before our eyes. ...Read the whole thing. Bransford certainly has a point or two. Stories definitely impact our thought processes, and writers as diverse as C.S. Lewis and Joan Didion have tried to write their way to comprehension of perplexing personal circumstances. But we must remember a salient point: The story isn’t the bedrock of communication. That honor goes to the humble proposition, and it informs the story at every point, sometimes explicit and blunt, sometimes implicit and lurking in the shadows. The actions of your characters, the details of your settings and the machinations of your plot are all freighted with propositions. So is basic communication, as evidenced by the manifold truth claims packed into Bransford's story-extolling essay. But without propositions, no narrative can exist. Conviction comes first. It's truly the father to the tale.
Life is too complicated to hold in your head and relationships are too immense and multi-faceted to easily comprehend. So we write and tell stories to make sense of our relationships and existence. A novel can capture more than we can readily contemplate, and an author can, brick by brick, build a world that can illuminate and give meaning to some part of the full tapestry of our lives and relationships. They help us understand things that are too difficult to think about all at once.
(Picture: CC 2007 by absolut xman)
4 comments:
"Life is too complicated to hold in your head and relationships are too immense and multi-faceted to easily comprehend. So we write and tell stories to make sense of our relationships and existence."
I think I'll push back again. Some things can be best told in propositions (I don't want Joss Whedon directing the instructions for how to tile my bathroom. Well, actually I do, but I know it wouldn't make me the best tiler. And then I'd trip and die pointlessly at the climactic moment of triumph.) Some things can't.
The phrase "war is Hell," for instance. Sure it's a proposition, and it is true as far as it goes. But it doesn't carry as much truth as, say, Saving Private Ryan, which although fictional communicates in a way propositions don't.
(This is why Chesterton once said that there is nothing so false as a truism--especially when the truism is true.)
Or another example. One could make the proposition: "sometimes following moral dictates can make you feel immoral and condemned." That one's confusing, and doesn't seem to say a lot (as propositions go.) But who has read the "All right then, I'll go to Hell!" passage of Huck Finn without leaving a changed and more thoughtful person?
This is why writers ranging from T.S. Eliot to Flannery O'Connor have stated that a good story is the most efficient way of stating/doing whatever it is the story states/does. O'Connor said something along the lines of "a good story cannot be summarized, it can only be expanded."
Conviction may be the father to many tales (though I think some good tales are also born of curiosity, trauma, or confusion), but the tale also has a mother, childhood friends, schools, and a variety of other formative influences. Often, rather than stating conclusions, stories leave questions open--they are places to make propositions, perhaps, rather than mere vehicles for those propositions.
This reminds me of Henry James theory of the impressionistic novel, where more than one points of view are presented!
Also of what Virginia Woolf once said:
" Life is not a series of gig lamps, symmetrically arranged. Life is a halo, a semi-transparent envelop that surrounds us from the beginning of our consciousness to the end"
CR,
Often, rather than stating conclusions, stories leave questions open--they are places to make propositions, perhaps, rather than mere vehicles for those propositions.
Yes. C.S. Lewis said something similar in (I think) An Experiment in Criticism, claiming that readers of fantasy couldn't discard such stories once they'd grasped their underlying assertions. And he was right. Stories are seamless garments; you can't dispose of plot, character and setting once you've apprehended propositional themes.
But that doesn't mean the propositions aren't there. And that doesn't mean readers can analyze them.
Perhaps "conviction" was a poor word choice. However, even stories that are more exploratory than didactic or polemic still have propositions woven into their fabric. By exploring a theme, the author asserts, "This idea is worth exploring even if I don't have a particular conclusion on it."
I don't really like preachy stories, truth be told. But I also don't like it when people claim that stories don't approve or disapprove certain things. One quote (I can't remember from where) went, "Asking a story to give a message is like asking a panda to juggle." But that's wrong on so many levels. As Brooks Landon said, we can help but create propositions even as we write sentences.
Mona,
For not the first time, I wish my literary education had included more American writers. I've read precious little of James or Woolf, and I think I'm impoverished for it.
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