Against storytelling

What do the writers Rebecca Solnit, Olga Tokarczuk and Amitav Ghosh have in common? All three have written about the need for stories to save the world. In an article about the climate crisis published in the Guardian on 12 January 2023, Solnit bluntly asserts that ‘every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis’. New and better stories will help people realize that a different world is possible. In her Nobel Lecture, Tokarczuk asserts that the world is crafted out of words; what is not told, disappears. She makes a plea for stories which go beyond the first-person perspective, for multi-layered fiction which breaks the narrow distinction between truth and falsehood, and thereby trains humans in humanity. Amitav Ghosh sees it as the task – the burden, even – of artists and writers to use stories to counter the anthropocentrism which threatens to destroy all life, including our own. It is a matter of ‘imperative moral urgency’ to listen to non-human voices as well, and the way to do this is through stories, he writes in The Nutmeg’s Curse (2023).

These are passionate appeals to the transformative power of stories, which you can also find in diluted form in newspapers. If only the ‘Left’ had a good story, they’d win the elections. If only you would tell the story of the destruction of the natural world well enough, people would simply have to listen. It has become commonplace to appeal to emotions and identities for effecting change, which is considered best achieved through telling stories. Dry facts, disturbing data and an overload of information are clearly not helping. Stories can open the portals of the soul. If you want to touch someone’s heart, that’s where it’s at. This is because of the way the brain supposedly works, how it makes sense of the world through narrative. How we see others, ourselves, the future and the past: only through a narrative structure, some claim. Living is storytelling and vice versa: ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’, in Joan Didion’s famous words.

Stories complicate things

There’s something about this glorification of the story that really bothers me (no offence, Rebecca, Olga and Amitav). For years now I’ve been making a collection of notes under the heading ‘Against Storytelling’. Especially in the Dutch context, storytelling primarily sounds like marketing. Stories are certainly utilized as a strategy to touch people’s hearts – but mostly when there is something to sell. This sort of storytelling, rather than an invitation to think, is a block on thinking. The same is true outside the context of advertising. We need to be convinced of something. But why should a story accomplish anything in the face of a planetary catastrophe? Is the Right really telling a better story than the Left, or do they just have very effective propaganda? There seems little to support the assumption that storytelling works at such a high level. Seldom do we hear of a story that has had such a profound impact.

The three authors I’ve named are born storytellers, but (thankfully!) their work cannot be reduced to solutions. Solnit’s take on ‘mansplaining’ has changed the way we see the world forever; Tokarczuk broadens the mind through employing a ‘fourth person perspective’ which catapults us beyond our own limited existence; Ghosh shows how events can bridge vast distances in time and space. Of these three approaches, the conceptualization of mansplaining has had the clearest impact, while the others’ stories have largely complicated matters.

More obvious examples of successful storytelling are the ‘Grand Narratives’ such as those of the church or political ideologies, which have with great difficulty been overturned to create space for a multitude of smaller stories. Hasn’t the most transformational power been the freedom to tell one’s own story? And yet that same freedom has given rise to a thirst for new stories which are grand and unifying.

My annoyance also stems from the fact that storytelling often seems to be a perfunctory trick. Thankfully the times when you could skip the first five paragraphs of every long read with their obligatory personal anecdote are behind us – that is storytelling at its most limited. But when you’re lured into reading an article or listening to a podcast via a story, it still often feels rather blatant. The essayistic style which blends non-fiction with narrative elements, held together by an authentic narrative voice, has become mainstream. What I like most about that style is its fragmentary and rambling quality – in other words, the non-storytelling aspect. I think my allergic reaction to the planet-saving story that’s supposed to put everything right has to do with the finality and completeness such a story must possess, tying up all the knots and serving up meaning. That has nothing to do with life as I have come to know it. But I will come back to this later.

Online stories smooth as porn

I’m not alone in my scepticism. Articles and books ‘against storytelling’ pop up fairly regularly. The philosopher Galen Strawson has been waging a crusade against the idea of humans as storytelling beings for years, including in his collection of essays Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, etc.(2018). In Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative (2022), Peter Brooks, a literary critic with a track record in narrativity, reflects critically on his own earlier ‘discovery of the crucial importance of narrative and storytelling’ in Reading for the Plot (1984). More recently the philosopher Byung-Chul Han brought out The Crisis of Narration (2024), in which he fiercely turns on the phenomenon of storytelling, albeit because he wants to rediscover the power of the story.

Let’s start with the last of these three. In his characteristically pointed and pedantic manner, Han explains where he sees things going wrong. The fact that everyone is talking about stories these days actually indicates their absence: ‘Paradoxically, the inflation of narrative betrays a crisis of narration. At the heart of all the noise of storytelling, there is a narrative vacuum that expresses itself in a lack of meaning and orientation’. For him the story in storytelling has little to do with actual stories. For these Han returns to the mythical campfire around which young and old alike gather to listen to tribal elders with concentrated faces and bated breath. Stories are priceless for their human, meaning-giving qualities, not the filth that capitalism has turned them into. ‘Storytelling is storyselling’ goes Han’s razor-sharp one-liner. We create story after story, but there’s no one shared purpose-giving story. And without such a story you get a fragmented, rudderless society which surrenders to the meaninglessness of consumerism and is susceptible to populism and conspiracy theories.

What actually gives stories their connecting power? Han describes them as a ‘concluding form’ ‘that founds meaning and identity’. Modernity sought to break open experience and push boundaries, which has led to us losing that closed order. It has turned us into lonely individuals, desperately searching for meaning. Han, who seems to have become increasingly conservative over the years, couples his criticism of digital technology to a rather old-fashioned idea of community, and links the story not only to the campfire but also to ritual, the religious calendar and the aura of art. Places and times where we can come together that are far removed from the screen. There we can share in common narratives that ‘anchor us in being’ instead of losing ourselves on our individual timelines.

The demise of the story is, Han claims, due to the combination of two connected factors: social media and capitalism. ‘With digital platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, we approach the degree zero of narration’, he writes. Screens have replaced the campfire; in the glow of the telephone screen we only exchange information, snippets removed from any meaningful context. ‘To the question “How do I add or edit a life event on my Facebook profile?”’, he comments wryly, ‘the answer is “Scroll down to posts and tap life event”’. The accumulation of information bereft of narrative meaning generates profit. Technology’s twin, capitalism, has transformed the world into a (digital) department store where stories serve only to market things or people.

We exchange information online at a frenetic pace. Not to learn about others but to sell ourselves. We present our struggles and successes in TED-talk language. Building our personal brand, we reduce the story to a first-person account that serves first-person interests. All symptoms of ‘main character syndrome’. This means storytelling also hinders systemic criticism. When everyone is busy selling themselves, it’s wisdom that loses out. Shared meaning is exchanged for divided meaninglessness. Maria Tumarkin calls these online stories and talks ‘conduits for the universal’: predictable storylines which lead to a fixed conclusion. (After all, the cliché would have it that here are only seven different plots.) But, she writes, such a universal form ‘can make friction-and-silence-laden spaces created by the telling and the listening feel smooth, elementary, back to how-it-once-was, like a woman after a Brazilian.’ That sounds like the nightmare that wakes Han in the middle of the night: online stories as smooth as porn, instant gratification that leaves the consumer empty and alienated.

What is the alternative proposed by Han? It seems he would have us exchange one universal – the zeros and ones of information – for another, the closed order of the story. But what this second order would look like remains vague. Does he mean the Grand Narratives of the past, whose overthrow Han barely touches on? Does he mean ‘big history’ as written by Yuval Noah Harari, which encompasses the whole history of humanity in a single gesture? Do conspiracy theories in which every little detail plays a role also count? Or does he mean an even more techno-capitalist closed system such as the metaverse or transhumanism? Tokarczuk writes about the twenty-first-century campfire of the Netflix series, but Han rejects that; viewers of series are, he writes, ‘fattened like consumer cattle’. Admittedly the Netflix storytelling formula has become quite worn out. But to me the idea of returning to a past in which everyone was satisfied with the same story sounds not only worn out but terribly claustrophobic.

Perhaps I’m part of the problem Han identifies – too postmodern and secular to even imagine a community united by stories. Since we learnt to see stories as constructs, and hence contingent and replaceable, we have been living in ‘post-narrative times’, Han writes. And that is not where he wants to be. In Seduced by Story, Brooks puts a different spin on this. According to him the basis for the ‘storification of reality’ is precisely our (post)modern upbringing, which has taught us to read reality as a story. He even points the finger of blame at Russian formalists and French structuralists. The advertising industry and the rise of social media have accelerated the process of storification. Since then, the story has become the dominant means of communication. There is no such thing as a mythical past in which humans were born as storytelling creatures, or if there was, that past was the twentieth century.

Instead of identifying the story as the core of humanity, a core that has been corrupted, one could see storification itself as corruption – though Brooks does not go so far as to assert that. Undoubtedly humans were once deeply religious and connected to each other, but for that no stories are needed. That function can be fulfilled just as well by music, songs or poetry.

Porous and incomplete

The term storytelling refers both to the modern proliferation of stories (in which everyone writes down their memoirs) and to the need for a single, unifying story (told around the campfire). It refers to the narrative structure that everyone superimposes on their own individual life and to the closed story with universal meaning. It refers to telling stories in order to sell things and telling stories in order to understand things. Storytelling is simultaneously problem and solution. But which form is the problem and which the solution?

Han struggles with the proliferation of stories. My resistance lies more in the closed nature of the story. (We both deplore the story as used in advertising.) If humans really are storytelling creatures, how can proliferation be wrong? It is notable that a book about narrativity and storytelling omits mention of the end of the Grand Narratives, as proclaimed by Lyotard. The power of the story lies precisely in the fact that there can always be another story to tell, a third, fourth and fifth.

As Han observes, populists have leapt in to fill the void of meaning-making, offering a closed order that provides meaning and identity. He asserts that those populist stories don’t work, that they don’t create community. I have my doubts. Their success actually calls into question the desirability of such closed stories. Storytelling doesn’t have to solve the lack of a great story by positing an alternative Grand Narrative. One can attempt to fill the vacuum of meaning with a diversity of stories, without necessarily resulting in a chorus of I’s.

It turns out that there are many alternative narrative forms we can take as example – such as indigenous storytelling in which we hear other voices, not only human ones. In Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) the biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes her conversations with plants – beings that are simply part of the whole in Potawatomi and other indigenous traditions. She, too, emphasizes that the way forward lies in telling different stories to the ones we are used to. Or take Saidiya Hartman’s ‘critical fabulation’, an academic method she uses to combine fact and fiction in order to give a voice to forgotten people and stories from history. Another example is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book, The Message (2024) in which he describes the arduous process whereby alternative stories – and therefore meanings – come to life, with reference to the transatlantic slave trade and Palestine. By connecting these two histories he creates a new narrative. The constructed character of the narrative does not detract from its meaning yet makes it very clear that narratives like these are not closed but open, porous and incomplete. A story is not owned by the narrator but arises in an inspired context of mutual exchange. Stories are living histories.

Oh, meaning!

Brooks opens his book with a short look back on his earlier belief in narrative as the structure of our lives. To some extent he has now been cured of this belief. I recognize this. I wrote above how I feel queasy when served with finished and complete, neatly packaged meaning, which is supposed to create connection and community. This was not always the case. Once I too was a believer, drawn to the idea that life is a story, that that’s how we make sense of reality. I studied Paul Ricœur’s narrative philosophy, which I recognized not only in my own life but also in TV series and social media. I immersed myself in ‘emplotment’ as a driving force for self-reflection and self-knowledge, in the story as an instrument for creating meaning, in the ethics of narrativity.

Oh, how I longed for ‘closure’ and meaning and community! And I probably also wanted to be proved right in having chosen to study literature, for the glorification of the story also suggests that the literary perspective is of the utmost value.

And then (and then…) came the Grand Narrative that tore the curtain from before my eyes, as Milan Kundera put it: the death of a loved one, my father. Nothing would ever again make sense or be anything but meaningless. And, since then, it is precisely that which I have sought in literature: stories which reveal the fragmentation, the meaninglessness and the randomness of life, that make you look suffering squarely in the eye. Stories that don’t try to be stories.

Oh, all those novels about death in which everything is still fine in the end (because the bereaved still find meaning, reconciliation and forgiveness)! Surely that has to be storytelling at its very worst. A TED talk in autobiographical form, spread over hundreds of pages. To me this is fake meaning, self-delusion rather than self-knowledge, fiction masquerading as reality. Life presented as a reality show, which becomes utterly unreal through the use of procedures borrowed from film and literature – in other words from fiction. I’d rather have social media. At least there you see the fragmented world piecemeal!

Everything is trauma these days, writes Parul Sehgal in ‘The Case Against the Trauma Plot’, a 2021 piece for The New Yorker, and with it every action is explained, smoothed over and neutralized. This is paradoxical because trauma is precisely a sign of damage, a tear with rough edges that can’t be explained away. But trauma, a category that functions in both the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) and in popular culture, has become a handy label for situating people and events. However, it comes at a price: according to Sehgal, the trauma plot flattens things, reduces characters to their symptoms and pours a portion of morality on top. It’s easy enough to resolve the paradox if you read the trauma plot as the outsider’s perspective, which then says little about what it’s like for the person actually suffering the trauma. (Sometimes the outsider is someone who has themselves recovered from trauma.) The plot, neatly sewn together and served up, is a talisman, a coping mechanism. A closed structure that gives meaning.

‘Trauma has become synonymous with backstory’ writes Seghal, but the need for a ‘backstory’ is a recent phenomenon. Personality need not equate to personal history. This point is endorsed by Strawson. In Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, etc.,1 he investigates the foundations of the thesis that humans are storytelling creatures. His conclusion is that there are none. Clearly frustrated, he argues that humans do not by definition understand themselves to be the result of their history. Strawson also wrote a philosophy paper on the subject: ‘Against Narrativity’, which in his book he titles ‘a fallacy of our age’.2 Some philosophers and psychologists go so far in equating humans and narrativity, he writes, that anyone who doesn’t understand their life as a story shouldn’t actually be deemed human.

He considers himself to belong to those people who have ‘episodic’ or ‘transient’ self-experience, in other words, who experience their lives as a succession of fleeting scenes which are not stored in the memory chronologically, let alone in the form of a story. Strawson considers himself here in company with Michel de Montaigne (who by his own account had a poor memory), Marcel Proust (who wrote of an ‘inner book’ that was written after a series of ‘involuntary memories’) and Virginia Woolf (consider Orlando).

I don’t know for certain if I am an episodic person like Strawson, although the fact that I am not sure probably implies that I am to some extent. I prefer to wriggle out of categorization. But I now understand better where my aversion to storytelling comes from: it does not resonate with who I am. When I look back on my life it’s not a storyline I see but something resembling an archaeological dig; here and there some deposits, some stones churning their way to the surface, a potsherd gleaming in the mud. Precocious but never grown-up, at first always the youngest and later always the oldest, already middle-aged in my twenties, a bit too much illness and death in my baggage but, as a result, strangely unburdened. A poor memory, for the future as well as for what has already been.

Strawson cautions the reader (and himself) against making a moral distinction between episodic and narrative people. One is not better than the other; they are different ways of being in the world. Ultimately what is important is not the story or its narrative form, but what gives meaning, or, as Han puts it ‘what anchors you in being’. Being episodic requires a different anchor. And if everything can be a story, from an advertising campaign to political propaganda, from an Instagram feed to a trauma plot, then we can also find meaning elsewhere, in places beyond the story.

After all, songs are also sung around the campfire. Poetry is recited in the darkness of the prison cell. The power of Rilke’s line ‘You must change your life’ really does change lives. There are collections of lapidaria (Ryszard Kapuściński) and frantumaglia (Elena Ferrante). Diaries and pillow books. With reference to perhaps the best novel I’ve read in the last decade, Shi Tiesheng’s Notes on Principles,3 the translator Mark Leenhouts writes that Chinese authors don’t care about plots. There is also Byung-Chul Han with his pointed pedantry. There are hashtags, memes and You-Tube videos. There is all that and more. We are not only storytellers, as Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us, but also storymakers. And to this I would add, readers, listeners, sharers and excavators.