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The Tyranny of the Tale

Are we consumed by too much storytelling?

Narrative structure, once the bastion of literature, seems to pervade society. Everything we touch turns to story. But what's crowded out when we adopt and adhere so closely to narrative structure as our primary means for making sense of the world and ourselves?

That's the question posed in Parul Sehgal's wonderful essay The Tyranny of the Tale (The New Yorker) (h/t to Bruce Kelly for sharing the article). Sehgal, a long-time NYT book critic, knows a thing or two about literary tales and narrative structure. She opens the essay with the story of Scheherazade from "The Arabian Nights" and how this fictional character has become a symbol for society's view of storytelling as savior.

Our appetite for pattern recognition and meaning-making glues us to story. Corporate branding campaigns . Politicians woo us more with their carefully crafted stories than detailed policy planks. The thinking goes that stories are easier to comprehend and thus more likely to persuade. Therapists, life coaches, and peloton instructors want us to reinvent ourselves and write new scripts. We're told that we need stories to fight climate change, protect democracy, make sense of a chaotic world.

Some of this can be explained by a pack mentality for overusing certain words and beating them into a muddy, meaningless pulp (authentic, literally are examples that come to mind), but it's not simply a problem of language. There's something more profound at work.

Sehgal calls it 'the narrative takeover of reality'. That takeover creates a growing chasm between living and telling. Literary memoir as a form gives the reader two narrative lenses -- the character experiencing a moment in his life and then the narrator examining it all to tell us what it means.

Telling a story is an act of selection. We choose convenient, affirming details to include in our stories, and discard the messy ones that stray from the plot. We ignore what we perceive as irrelevancies.

The late historian Hayden White uses a phrase I love, 'emplotment', to describe how the imposition of story structure on historical facts alters the experience. Robin Wall Kimmerer, who writes about indigenous wisdom, says that every story displaces some other body of knowledge.

And so what is being crowded out by our narrative blinders? The vast majority of what we experience in our lives doesn't fit into a neat story format with a basic beginning-middle-end structure. Sehgal calls it the dark matter of our lives. Virginia Woolf called it our 'cotton wool':

That cotton wool is just living and experiencing without the self-imposed shackles of constant, relentless meaning-making. I think this is what Sehgal means when she says that story blinds us to other approaches. Other approaches in life, but also in, dare I say, story.

The essay provides a framework for how to reclaim story and see the differences between living and telling.

Loving another seems an apt example. Certainly being in love applies, but so does loving another person whether family or friend. It doesn't require a three-act structure; it's mere existence is the thing to cherish and embrace.

And telling doesn't have to be the nemesis of living. We can find better approaches there too. In fact, Sehgal's essay explains a lot of why I gravitate to flash fiction and short stories. Both often exist as single scenes, ideas, and emotions, unhindered by the supposed necessity of plot. In his excellent flash craft book, The Art of Brevity, Grant Faulkner says this:

Maybe letting go of story, and the commensurate pressures of relentless meaning-making, is a way to unlock more meaning in our lives. Less narrating, and more noticing of the dark matter.

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