On Stories (Thinking in Action)

by Richard Kearney

Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living. They are what make our condition human.

Myths were stories people told themselves in order to explain themselves to themselves and to others. But it was Aristotle who first developed this insight into a philosophical position when he argued, in his Poetics, that the art of storytelling – defined as the dramatic imitating and plotting of human action – is what gives us a shareable world.

What works at the level of communal history works also at the level of individual history. When someone asks you who you are, you tell your story.

(Zusammenhang des Lebens),

In our own postmodern era of fragmentation and fracture, I shall be arguing that narrative provides us with one of our most viable forms of identity – individual and communal.

And it is this crucially intersubjective model of discourse which, I’ll be claiming, marks narrative as a quintessentially communicative act.

Once the listeners heard the beginning they wanted to find out the middle and then go on to the end. Stories seemed to make some sense of time, of history, of their lives. Stories were gifts from the gods enabling mortals to fashion the world in their own image.

From the word go, stories were invented to fill the gaping hole within us, to assuage our fear and dread, to try to give answers to the great unanswerable questions of existence: Who are we? Where do we come from?

Mythic narrative mutated over time into two main branches: historical and fictional.

The second branch of narrative, the fictional, also moved away from traditional mythos, but in a different direction from the historical. Fictional narratives aimed to redescribe events in terms of some ideal standard of beauty, goodness or nobility. This reached its most dramatic form in romance, a literary genre typified by such works

That is why I believe that no matter how ‘post’ our third-millennium culture becomes, we shall never reach a moment when the phrase ‘This is a story about . . .’ ceases to fascinate and enchant.

mimetic function.

When Aristotle defines mimesis in his Poetics as the ‘imitation of an action’, he means a creative redescription of the world such that hidden patterns and hitherto unexplored meanings can unfold. As such mimesis is essentially tied to mythos taken as the transformative plotting of scattered events into a new paradigm (what Paul Ricoeur calls the ‘synthesis of the heterogeneous’).11 It has little or nothing to do with the old naturalist conviction that art simply holds a mirror up to nature.

mimesis-mythos

catharsis:

It is this curious conflation of empathy and detachment which produces in us – viewers of Greek tragedy or readers of contemporary fiction – the double vision necessary for a journey beyond the closed ego towards other possibilities of being.

In these two novels, amongst the most innovative in modern fiction, Joyce sets out to tell the story of Dublin as it has never been told before. What is at issue is a narrative miracle of transubstantiation where simple contingencies of everyday existence can be transmuted into narrative ‘epiphanies’. A literary version of divine demiurgy. That, and nothing less, is what storytelling meant to Joyce.

A coincidentia oppositorum which Joyce seems to suggest is conceivable only through narrative imagination.

Joyce was not the only writer of his culture to wrest fictional triumph from historical failure. Several of his compatriots also looked to storytelling as compensation for the mortifications of famine, disinheritance, poverty, priest-ridden philistinism, insular rivalry, loss of language and mass emigration. Most notable of these were revivalists like Yeats and Synge and modernists like Beckett.

On the one hand, we have the Beckettian persuasion that since most forms of narrative are fibs to ward off the pain of the real, we should pare our stories down until they become ‘residua’ or ‘no-texts’.

Here we find the narrator imagining, for example, that imagination is dead – but still, therefore, imagining. A performative contradiction perfectly captured in Beckett’s own title: Imagination Dead Imagine.

On the other hand, we have the Joycean imperative to recreate history in its entirety, epitomised in the resolve to tell everything so that nothing remains alien to what is told!

Like Daedalus before them, they are fascinated by how history is altered in the telling, how the retelling itself changes the way things were in order to make a story out of how things might have been. (The future anterior is a favourite tense.) And they wonder how poetic lies, which ostensibly distort truth, can contrive at times to tell another kind of truth, sometimes a truer truth.

can fictional stories be true?

A poor man, he gave himself a lie. He filled the hole with many lives.’4

A pessimist might identify this as akin to an opiate of the masses.

The narrator then goes on to explore how stories allow us to tell certain things about our lives which we would never allow ourselves to tell in real life. In fantasy, as it were, the guards are down, the censors gone on holiday, and all kinds of suppressed or silenced material can find its way into language for the first time.

But this does not mean, as might first appear, a collapsing of the distinction between the imaginary and the real. On the contrary, it is only made possible by this distinction.

T. S. Eliot was quite right, I suspect, when he said that humankind cannot bear too much reality. For just as the body releases endorphins to cope with unbearable pain, so too the human psyche has all kinds of denial mechanisms against loss.

‘The men and women there are narratives, endlessly complex and intriguing. The most humdrum of them constitutes a narrative that would defeat Tolstoy at his best and most voluminous.’ The narrator’s point seems to be that human lives embody narratives which no fictional narrative could ever accurately transpose. Novels impose some kind of selection and sequence on the Babel of stories, spoken and unspoken, that are jangled and jumbled together in a modern city.

In such a scenario, the novelist becomes someone who discloses rather than imposes, who listens gently when the city quietens and sleeps, so that he might ‘hear the ghosts of stories whispered’. And at such times, the storyteller feels himself in the presence of something greater than himself.

The Muse

First, there are stories which we inherit from our family, culture or religion. These are the narratives of fatherlands and motherlands: ancestral stories which often function as myths.

Second, there are stories which serve the purpose of creation, in the sense of pure creatio ex nihilo.

Third, we have the sense of stories as creative solutions for actual problems. Here narrative fiction draws from the first two functions while adding a supplementary one – that of cathartic survival.

This volume is the first in a trilogy bearing the overall title ‘Philosophy at the Limit’. The two subsequent volumes are entitled Strangers, Gods and Monsters (London and New York, Routledge, forthcoming 2002) and The God who May Be (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 2001). Each deals, in its different way, with experiences of extremity which reside at the edge of our conventional understanding, seeking to address phenomena beyond the strict frontiers of reason alone in efforts to imagine new possibilities of saying and being. The three volumes share an abiding conviction that when we are confronted with the apparently inexplicable and unthinkable, narrative matters.