Why we love a good yarn
Francis Sedgemore, Tuesday 23 September 2008
As a rule I don’t read the magazine Scientific American, but there is an interesting article by Jeremy Hsu in the latest issue on the pervasiveness of storytelling in what has become a very facts-oriented world whose inhabitants appear to have ever-decreasing attention spans.
Storytelling interests me greatly – both reading and listening to tales, and striving to understand the power of the medium in the modern world. I’ve written about it on this here webspace, and refer you also to the words of my friend Anja, a literature scholar based in Germany.
Hsu’s magazine feature is interesting, but like Norman Geras I don’t think it tells the whole story. The author’s take on storytelling comes across to me as rather utilitarian, focusing as it does on fiction as a training ground for social interaction in the real world. But what of the narrative form as a means of exercising our creative imaginations as well as intellects, as a medium for spiritual musings in the absence of gods and their earthly high representatives, or as pure, unadulterated fun with no practical purpose?
Feed the writer! 
Wednesday 1 October 2008 at 18:18 UTC
It’s odd, the pervasiveness of the topic of narrative. Once you’re hooked, you find it everywhere.
I’m currently rereading Graham Swift’s novel Waterland (still as disturbing as it was when I first read it a while ago), and came across the following passage:
“To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings? …. If you have become prosperous by selling fine quality barley, if you can look down from your Norfolk uplands and see in these level Fens – this nothing-landscape – an Idea, a drawing-board for your plans, you can outwit reality. But if your are born in the middle of that flatness, fixed in it, glued to it even by the mud in which it abounds …?
How did the Cricks outwit reality? By telling stories. Down to the last generation, they were not only phlegmatic but superstitious and credulous creatures. Suckers for stories. While the Atkinsons made history, the Cricks spun yarns.”
I underlined this passage when I first read it, commenting upon it in the margin: “perspective!”. Today,this pompous token of my former misguided radical constructionism (“Reality is all stories!”) really seems to miss the point of the novel – which emphasises that although we make stories out of reality, and for many reasons, these stories can’t replace the world.
Anja
Wednesday 1 October 2008 at 19:35 UTC
Anja – Waterland is a disturbing text, and to my mind one that is warped by the author’s own twisted melancholia. So the Atkinsons made history while the Cricks spun yarns? The Atkinsons are few while the Cricks are legion, in which case stories not replacing the world is neither here nor there.
The quoted passage is great writing, but what a miserable bugger is Graham Swift!
Wednesday 1 October 2008 at 19:43 UTC
“… but what a miserable bugger is Graham Swift”.
May I quote you on that when I teach the book?
Wednesday 1 October 2008 at 19:44 UTC
As long as you introduce me as “esteemed cultural critic Herr Doktor Francis Sedgemore”.