'Story' as an Evolutionary Force
Circling back to the “why”. How every story you were ever told holds greater coherence than you know.
It is time to pull my nose from the stone. These weeks I’ve been immersed in the terrain of a future craft; riding the wild dragon that came loose inside me when I was down with a tropical malady. I’m reading How Novels Work, a dream work, which is like an MFA for the casual reader. It is a book club that doesn’t discuss the content of novels, rather the construction of novels. To the layman, the fictional work appears as an uncharted and insurmountable mountain — endlessly complex, and teeming with heroism for the one that summits it. The keys of constructing a novel seemed obfuscated by culture however… until now.
I have also been taking a course called How to Write. Now you’ll tell me if my prose is any clearer, any correcter, more prone to magical turns. But (yes, I know…) I’m encouraged that, just as there are hordes en guard these days to help you resolve questions around your intimate life, there’s a machination of help to assist you in every area of your writing. Never has the path to authorial initiation been better paved! Never has the world had — as a proportion of its educated population, I sense — less curious and committed readers.
I have doubts and fears to be walking the way of literature. But mainly, I feel dragon.
I have also been enjoying Chris Booker’s Seven Basic Plots, possibly the most comprehensive guide to storytelling and the human psyche that exists, a book appraised (hold your hairpiece) by none other than Sir Roger Scruton. Booker’s thesis, quite simply, is that every human story that was ever told, and successfully told, fits into one of seven archetypal categories: overcoming the monster, rags to riches, voyage and return, quest, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth. Whether high fiction, B-movie, epic poem or religious fable, every great story fits into one of these seven categories. Stories that don’t, Booker will argue, represent a corruption of human morality, and a species losing its way.
If the shapes of our human stories are so ubiquitous and repetitive, if children plead to hear stories as soon as they can talk, if the cutting edge of marketing impels advertisers large and small to thrust story story story into their campaigns, one might pause and wonder: how did it come to be this way? Is there an evolutionary mechanism that has caused the story to thrive? Is story an evolutionary mechanism that enabled us to survive?
I would say so. In 2006, the year before my kidnap in Bolivia, I came across a Venezuelan film called Secuestro Express. It was a gritty, real-time almost docu-drama of an upper class couple who were kidnapped, beaten and gagged in the Caracas night, that cool salve of lead pressed into their temples, and were escorted to an ATM for all they could withdraw. I believe they got away safely in the end. But it wasn’t the end of the movie I remembered… rather the phenomenological, real-time visceral unfolding of the heist, and the direct empathic transmission of what it was like to be captured and taken.
Miraculously (although on current reflection it wasn’t miraculous, but part of cultural design), I had all the inner resources I needed to make it through my twenty-four hour kidnap ordeal. I’ve been through this experience cinematically, my body knew. There is a particular way to overcome this monster. And with a calm, knowing cooperation, I made it out the other side.
The story, therefore, can be seen as an evolutionary device that pre-loads our consciousness with the wherewithal to survive the perils and meaninglessness of life. If one is open to story one might trust in the serendipity of comedy, be forewarned of sins that engender tragedy, learn something of fight, pattern-spotting, and faith.
The story-teller thus programmes his species to face the trials we all stand to face.
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Although I’m tempted to end with the gravity of that thought above, I’m inclined to close the circle, and tell you that I’m taking these next four months as a sabbatical. The dragon wants to study the craft and device of the story, to make the story — and in particular the novel, the novella — a professional and loving abode. I want to pre-programme the species with the psycho-spiritual capacities to succeed in a more complex paradigm of living. And I hope not to do so through moral instruction, but by way of, you guessed it, the trojan horse.
So look out in bookstores, one and all. For I may go to print with an altered ego!