Stories

Driving down a motorway last week – a rare thing: I don’t get out much – I had radio 4 on the car radio and there was Marina Warner (whom I deeply respect) talking about ‘story-telling’. Rag-bag stuff, punctuated by some Satie music and very actorish readings from Moby Dick and Treasure Island. I switched over.

Story-telling festivals, courses in ‘how to tell’ a story … Odd, this cult of the story, of humans as ‘a story-telling species’, the best we can do; I mean, the assumption that telling stories is a good thing to be doing. Religions favour stories; so does the right wing (‘the story of England’); so does the left wing (from what what I remember of her last book, Rebecca Solnit talks a lot about story).

Story-telling may well be a ‘natural’ thing to do – we use them to explain the world to ourselves, and ourselves to ourselves, and when we get it wrong (which is usually the case) we are reluctant to give those stories up. But stories are surely basically conservative, retrospective, an imposing of pattern on experience. They are little machines for containing things. Stories are secondary. (I deeply distrust biographies, which turn lives – which at any given point could go right or left or straight on – into simple narratives.)

I’m as fascinated by stories as anyone else; not least by the way they often turn out to be about something different from what we thought they were about when we told them. They’re not going to go away. E. M. Forster, famously: ‘Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story.’ But the best novels are in at least two minds about their own stories even as they make them up, and it’s this resistance to story-telling that makes them worth reading. (Nothing new here, of course.)