July 10 & 17, 2023 Issue

Parul Sehgal, in her absorbing “Tell No Tales,” in this week’s issue, surveys the literature of the “story skeptics” - writers and scholars who resist the “magic of storytelling.” She writes,

Meanwhile, the story skeptics trace how we have learned to live—as Jonathan Gottschall writes in “The Story Paradox”—in “unconscious obedience” to the grammar of story. Story lulls. It encourages us to overlook the fact that it is, first, an act of selection. Details are amplified or muted. Apparent irrelevancies are integrated or pruned. Each decision is an argument, each argument an imposition of meaning, each imposition an exercise of power. When applied to history, it is a process that the late scholar Hayden White termed “emplotment”—in which experience is altered when squeezed into even the most rudimentary beginning-middle-end structure. Memoirists are increasingly conscious of the toll that such arcs exact. The American poet Maggie Smith, in her new book, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” notes wryly, “It’s a mistake to think of my life as plot, but isn’t this what I’m tasked with now—making sense of what happened by telling it as a story?” 

Well, all writing is selection. Nevertheless, I agree with Sehgal that it’s a mistake to think of life in terms of story. Our lives are not like novels. It’s delusion to think they are. So … how to represent life if not by narrative? What is the alternative to story? Sehgal proposes “swarm”:

Swarm, not story: when a heroine in Elena Ferrante’s work loses the plot or floats free from it, it is that very word she reaches for—“swarm.” “Frantumaglia”—a jumble of fragments—is what Ferrante titled a collection of her nonfiction writing, deploying an expression that her mother would use to describe being “racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart.” A swarm possesses its own discipline but moves untethered. Nothing about the notion of a swarm comforts or consoles. It doesn’t contain, like a story. It allows—contradiction, dissonance, doubt, pure immanence, movement, an open destiny, an open road.

That appeals to me. Another alternative is form-finding. Galen Strawson defines it as follows:

Storytelling is a species of form-finding, and the basic model for it, perhaps, is the way in which gifted and impartial journalists or historians report a sequence of events. Obviously they select among the facts, but they do not, we suppose, distort to falsify them, and they do more than merely list them in the correct temporal order, for they also place them in a connected account. Storytelling of this sort involves the ability to detect - not invent - developmental coherencies in the manifold of one’s life. It’s one way in which one may be able to apprehend the deep personal constancies that do in fact exist in the life of every human being - although this can also be done by form-finding without storytelling. [“A Fallacy of Our Age,” included in Strawson’s 2018 essay collection Things That Bother Me]