Use and abuse of storytelling

Powerful and pervasive as it is, storytelling has its limitations. (Representational image: Evangeline Shaw via Unsplash)

Managers do it, TED presenters do it, politicians do it, even scientists do it. Everyone is telling stories. As Robert Fulford puts it in The Triumph of Narrative: “Of all the ways we communicate with one another, the story has established itself as the most comfortable, the most versatile — and perhaps also the most dangerous.”

Especially nowadays, storytelling as a tool of organisation and persuasion is seen as essential. Take a look at the many books on the subject. A random search throws up the following: Storytelling with Data, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, Strategic Storytelling, and the all-encompassing The Storytelling Edge: How to Transform Your Business, Stop Screaming into the Void, and Make People Love You.

For tech-age author and entrepreneur Seth Godin, “persistent, consistent, and frequent stories, delivered to an aligned audience, will earn attention, trust, and action”. Realising that he was on to something, he took it a step further: “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.”

What explains the hold that stories have over us? Neuroscientists point out that our brains aren’t designed to perceive every aspect of the outside world. Instead, we select key features and create patterns to form a coherent whole that mimics reality. For anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “the drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs”. As they say, we’re hardwired for stories.

The pleasures and perils of storytelling are the subject of a new book by Yale comparative literature professor Peter Brooks. In Seduced by Story, he writes about the “narrative takeover of reality” that has occurred since the publication of his earlier Reading for the Plot. That volume was about the crucial importance of storytelling. In this one, he warns: “The universe is not our stories about the universe, even if those stories are all we have”.

As a literary theorist, Brooks delves into how stories have been crafted and used by authors over the years. Such writers, he says, have a clear understanding of what narrative can and cannot accomplish. The multiple perspectives of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, the narrative splintering in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the manipulation of plot in John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: these and more show “how stories come to be known and told and retold by those who stand in relation to them, and for whom sometimes these questions may be a matter of life and death”.

The spirit of Walter Benjamin is present in much of the book, especially the observations in his influential essay, The Storyteller. In that piece, Benjamin dwells on the tension between oral and written means of storytelling, as well as the vital exchange of one person transmitting the experience of life to another. As Brooks puts it, readers look to novels for what is shut off to them in their lives: the knowledge of death. It is with the end of a life that its meaning becomes apparent.

Benjamin’s nuanced analysis “is at once an affirmation that other forms—and all forms—of narrative need to be analytically engaged”. Because they are crucial to self-understanding, stories should be interrogated: who is telling them, why and how are they being told, and what are the effects they have?

Brooks also draws on the work of Paul Ricoeur and Donald Winnicott to make the case that storytelling can be seen as a form of play. It is, he writes, “an attempt to find a space in which the human mind can deal with reality, speak of it, reshape it imaginatively, ask ‘what if” questions about it”.

Storytelling, then, may be the best tool we have for transmitting what we know about life by giving it shape and meaning — but only up to a point. Some narratives can be self-serving; others could whip up nationalistic frenzy; yet others may influence laws, social structures and questions of morality and gender identity.

It is because stories are so seductive that they demand a powerful critical response. Depending on who is telling them, storytelling can become a way of avoiding responsibility, evading questions and side-stepping logical arguments.

That is why, writes Brooks, though we may be swamped in stories, we should not lose the ability to distinguish between different forms of construction. “What we need may rather be an analytic unpacking of the claims for narrative, a clearer understanding of what it can and cannot accomplish.”

While we should “celebrate the human capacity to imagine, to create other worlds,” we should also retain a degree of scepticism. Paying close attention to stories is the best way of dealing with them and meeting John Berger’s challenge: “Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.”