We Need Story
, But We also Need to be Critics
Occasionally, when I tell someone about a book I’m reading, he or she will ask, “Is it real, or just a story?” They want to know this right up front.
The part of my personality I have come to label “professorial” always feels provoked by this question. Especially the “just a story” line. It takes great restraint for me to answer “No, it’s a novel,” when I know they are really asking, “Is the story nonfiction?”
By that, they mean, did the story really happen?
I will sometimes try to challenge their assumptions about fiction and fact by noting that even nonfiction accounts are sometimes open to questioning, or written with various motives and open to different points of view.
But they don’t usually listen to that. They assert that they only read nonfiction, only what is true or what has really happened.
I don’t know how popular this belief is. But thinking that fiction is not real and therefore not worth our time misses an important point about stories, whether fictional, nonfictional, real, faked, or imagined.
As a good friend often says when we talk about the movies we’ve seen, stories can be healing. They help us to process our experiences. For my friend, these healing stories can even be found in comic books.
Psychologists often use story when working with children suffering from trauma.
At another level, stories help us to imagine the world as a place where our actions might have significance.
To tell stories may not be to tell the truth, as some people like to say, but it is to make meaning.
My wife, for most of her adult life, was drawn to medical stories on TV. She watched them all: MASH, ER, Chicago Hope, Gray’s Anatomy, House, Call the Midwife. She often talked about her mother’s love of Marcus Welby, MD. She was just beginning to watch The Pit when we lost her.
After almost 40 years, I still don’t think I understand fully what these shows gave her. In the ‘90s, I thought it was just George Clooney and the emotional effects of those first ER seasons.
After a while, I saw that these stories reflected something rich for her about the human condition—her human condition—in a hospital where monumental challenges were faced, with uncertain outcomes for individuals and families, and solutions were found or not found through intelligence, training, and imagination. In a single episode, lives could be altered forever, and there was something about watching patients come in with life threatening illnesses and being watched over by skilled but flawed human beings called doctors and nurses who could fail but often didn’t.
This is me talking about the values, not her, so I can’t say with any certainty that this is what she watched. I didn’t have to spend part of my childhood going from hospital to hospital or from treatment to treatment. But all of this happened to her when she was still a girl and continued for much of her life. Watching the programs, she was recognizing something, situating her experiences in a way that helped her to deal with them.
I also understand now in ways that I confess that I couldn’t before that she was also thinking about her own future possibilities. I didn’t always understand some of the concerns that, for her, were behind her accounts of these stories.
Story also was behind a lot of the healing I experienced after we lost our son. In the months and years that followed, I read many memoirs written by grieving parents. I heard stories at the SOS group I attended. I can pin-point when my grief first shifted from complete despair to hope when I heard another parent tell her story about losing her son five years earlier. It was the way she concluded it: she had eventually found some things in life worth living for again. She said this in the form of her story of her son, and there appeared for me at that meeting, two months after our loss, a small pinpoint of light at the end of the long tunnel of darkness ahead of me.
This is how I think about stories. They help us to process meaning in our lives. But as I’ve noted already, they can also, in some cases, reach another level, that of a myth, a word that some critics use to describe a story so true to us that it is almost invisible in its structure behind the way we think. These stories can appear as fiction or nonfiction.
Some of this understanding is hidden in our English vocabulary. We have to go back to the Greek word mythos, which means simply a story.
In English, the derived word “myth” refers to one particular type of story that, for better or worse, we label “unscientific” or more interestingly, “a lie.” I find it interesting that the word we use to designate an account given to help us understand our purpose is also one of our synonyms for telling untruths.
The Greek use of the term doesn’t seem to do this. So I try to give the English word “myth” added meaning, because I think that we are missing something about the importance of stories.
As an adult, my father watched Gunsmoke on TV and read a lot of fiction, but it was of the kind we might call “real world.” He was a newspaper reporter, and I think “real world” mostly meant what he would designate as fiction that rejected the uses of magic and the supernatural.
When he saw me reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy in high school, he said that the world itself was complicated and full of mystery and surprise. Fantasy couldn’t come close to the reality around us. Who needed it?
I have eventually, over decades, concluded that he was right about the world we live in. It is wild and surprising and interesting. And I get his point about escapism. But also believe he was missing the obvious point here.
My dad read Zane Grey Western novels as a kid. He still had a few of them around in our house when my brother, sister, and I were growing up. I don’t know if he ever counted the Westerns he read or watched as fantasy or thought about them like that. But I certainly think they are. Stories of the old West expressed something deeply important to his generation, the first generation for whom the old west could be called “historical.”
Bad acting and racism aside, those stories engaged in a myth formulated in the doctrine called Manifest Destiny about America that the generation that survived the Great Depression and the Second World War lived by. This is a world that has passed away now.
My generation, the boomers, found the gender roles typified by John Wayne and the racism implicit in Manifest Destiny to be toxic and increasingly questionable. But we didn’t reject mythmaking. We made the big shift from stories told about the “old West” to stories told about “outer space,” as it was often called in the ‘60s at the height of the space race we were growing up with.
At the level at which my dad—a news reporter who valued mainly facts—was reading Westerns about gunslingers taking over small towns, I was taking in Star Trek and Lord of the Rings fantasies, imagining deep mines and wizards with secret powers, stories that transport readers to a world they do not have access to otherwise.
Star Trek was to many in my generation a form of storytelling that approached myth making, where we got to see not only our fantasies of where the space race might take us, but also what we might today call equal rights and civility between races and cultures. It is now commonly known that Gene Roddenberry first pitched his sci-fi adventures to the networks as a “wagon train to the stars.” I think this shows that he understood the myth telling goin on behind stories and the worlds he was pitching.
I would only add that these effects of story don’t only concern Westerns or science fiction. They can also be found in nonfiction. Think of the various retellings of the fall of the Alamo—most of which we are now learning from historical research were not only not true, but often told with a desire to prop up a myth about how Texas was won and became a state. “Don’t tread on me” and “Don’t mess with Texas” come from this old myth. They people who say those things apparently don’t want the full history. They want the myth.
Other examples of this merging of fact and non-fact are the two movies I am familiar with that were based on the sinking of the Titanic. One appeared in the 1950s with Barbara Stanwyck and concerned a husband and wife breaking apart over the revelation that their son was not really the husband’s son. The other, of course, is the one from the 1997 with Jack and Rose and dealing with an abusive relationship and a forbidden romance.
I sometimes think about running these “nonfiction” tales by my friends who only want “real stories” to find out how they might situate these two very different accounts of the loss of life on that night in 1912 in the cold North Atlantic.
Both draw on some research and historical data, but both also have mythic resonances for their very different audiences, one in the 1950s about coming to terms with family conflict, and one in the 1990s about navigating abuse in relationships and finding life after the loss of true love.
The only caveat I would add to this is that if we are going to recognize story for what it is, we should also be good critics of our own stories.
By critic, I don’t mean that we should all become English majors—though that wouldn’t be a bad move. I mean that we should be open to recognizing that the stories we tell are rhetorical. They preach values. We should be willing to make those values more visible to ourselves. We should also be willing to recognize when maybe we’re taking them too far. Most people, I think, already do this.
As much as I grew up watching and being informed by Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Lieutenant Uhuru on the bridge, I’m willing to see that the “final frontier” might not be theirs. It really might not be “outer space,” as we called it in the 1950s and ‘60s. It probably is still the world we inhabit every day.
Thanks for sharing. We English majors love pondering the value of stories. Myth and symbol contribute to how we make sense of our confounding worlds.
I like the fact that Jesus used stories to make a WHOLE lot of His points! ...kind of legitimizes the use of story, eh? ;D And a good story has layers, like an arpeggio, it resonates in multiple ways.