I recently had one of those juxtapositions of experience which led to an epiphany, albeit an epiphany that I have been working towards for some time. Long-term readers would know that a large part of my writing and thinking over the last many years has been on the subject of “stories”. In fact, my first non-fiction book was called “The Plague Story” and featured my analysis of the covid hysteria as coalescing around a narrative about viral outbreaks that had been created by Hollywood. For the last half dozen years, I have been thinking actively about stories and discovering all kinds of new insights along the way.
My most recent book was on the stories of Shakespeare and included a chapter on Macbeth. I have probably read Macbeth more times than any other work of the Bard’s. Nevertheless, while I was having drinks at the pub with some friends recently, the subject of Macbeth came up, and, after about thirty minutes of intense discussion, I came to realise a new perspective on the story that I had missed. Despite all of my thinking about that particular story, I still had more to learn.
The juxtaposition came the very next day when I stumbled across a short clip of the famous conductor Leonard Bernstein talking about Beethoven. I won’t explain what Bernstein said, except to say that it was, in my humble opinion, bullshit. It reminded me of another video I once saw of Bernstein where he was trying to explain music theory in terms of Chomskyan linguistic theory. This idea was also, in my humble opinion, bullshit.
Bernstein’s tenuous ideas about music reminded me of a quote attributed to John Lennon which reads, “Writing about music is like talking about f**king”. A more polite version of the same idea goes “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. The underlying meaning is the same: there is nothing to be learned by writing or thinking about music. Leonard Bernstein’s vacuous ramblings about Beethoven are prima facie evidence for that. But the Macbeth revelation that I had experienced in the pub showed that the same was not true for stories. It seems that writing and thinking about stories is different from writing and thinking about music.
This led me to the following hypothesis: of all the art forms, only stories require thinking. To say it more precisely, thinking can enhance our understanding of art forms involving stories. For all other art forms, thinking detracts from our understanding and appreciation. John Lennon’s assertion that it is worthless to think about music applies equally to painting, sculpture, dance, architecture, etc., but it doesn’t apply to stories. The question is: why?
Let’s go back to basics. A work of art is always experienced in the first instance. While we are experiencing it, we are not thinking about it. Thinking comes later. Thus, the kind of thinking that we are talking about is reflective in nature. This is different from mathematical or logical thinking, which is not applied to experience. The kind of thinking we do about art has much more in common with the scientific method in that it begins with observation and experience and then afterwards tries to make sense of it.
Listening to Beethoven or John Lennon is an experience. The question is, can thinking enhance our understanding and appreciation of that experience? You can test this idea for yourself. Have you ever heard a piece of music, thought about it for a while, and then gone back to listen to it again, and felt as though you appreciated it more? Lennon’s point was that this doesn’t happen. Therefore, all writing and thinking about music is worthless.
Here we must be careful to distinguish between a related way we attune ourselves to music. When you hear a piece that you really like, you want to listen to it again. The next time you listen, you remember something of what you heard the first time. After repeated listens, you come to know which parts are your favourite, and you look forward to them. If we agree that this amounts to an enhancement of appreciation of the artwork, we can also agree that it comes not from thinking but from memory. It’s the same kind of memory that we may use to determine what sort of food we like to eat or what climate we enjoy. It is not an exploratory kind of thinking like science.
There is another kind of thinking about music we can do which is exploratory in nature. It’s the kind that Leonard Bernstein was doing in his interview about Beethoven. He referred to the technical aspects of Beethoven’s work, specifically the use of melody and harmony. This is the most common kind of thinking that is done about works of art. It relates to the technical aspects of the art form. Thus, we can think about Van Gogh’s brush technique, the use of the chorus in Greek tragedy, or Michelangelo’s methods for choosing the right marble.
However, this kind of thinking is still not what we are looking for because it does not enhance our understanding of the artwork itself. Thinking about the technical aspects of art may enhance our understanding and appreciation of the artist, but not the artwork. The same is even more true for the more abstract kind of thinking embodied in Bernstein’s conjecture about how the “music faculty” is related to the linguistic. Even if that were true, a knowledge of it in no way enhances our understanding and appreciation of Beethoven’s 9th symphony.
The same goes for all of the philosophical, sociological, psychological, economic, political, or other thinking that gets applied to art. Whatever the validity of these in and of themselves, they make no difference to our appreciation of art. In fact, they may actively harm that appreciation if we find ourselves no longer even experiencing the artwork anymore but only thinking about it.
Thus, I agree with John Lennon. Listening to music is an experience, and that experience cannot be enhanced via thinking. I argue that the same is true of poetry, dancing, painting, sculpture, etc. As far as I can tell, the only kinds of art which require thinking are those which feature stories. This includes literature, film, theatre, and opera. But I would go one step further. Not only does thinking and discussing a story enhance our appreciation of it, for the truly great storytellers like Shakespeare, it is the only way to understand the deeper meanings.
The reason for this relates to the nature of stories themselves. A story is about the transformation of the hero and their world. The transformation includes potentially all aspects of what it is to be human. Therefore, to understand a story, we must understand what it is to be human. The problem is, we don’t really know what it is to be human. The behaviour of other people and even ourselves is a constant source of confusion and misunderstanding. How do we resolve that confusion? By thinking and talking about it.
Well, the exact same thing holds for a fictional story. It holds all the more for the greatest of stories because the truly great storytellers push the boundaries of our understanding. They force us to think. The kind of thinking they force us into is about what it means to be human.
Now, in relation to an understanding of story-as-art, there is a subtle but crucial point to understand. The thinking we do about a story enhances and deepens our understanding of the artwork itself. You read Macbeth and then reflect on what it means. This thinking feeds back into the next reading, where you notice things you missed the first time. New problems arise which lead to more thinking. Each of these iterations reveals to us more about the story itself. That’s what I mean when I say that thinking enhances our understanding. That is the big difference between thinking about stories and thinking about any other art form.
If we agree that thinking about stories is necessary to reveal the deeper meanings contained therein, it is nevertheless true that the kind of thinking done about stories by the intellectual classes of society has almost entirely fallen into the same traps mentioned above. It has concerned itself with either the technical aspects of the art form or with extrapolating to larger socio-cultural issues. Therefore, most of the intellectual thinking that has been done has not enhanced an understanding of the artwork itself. This was the realisation I came to when researching my recent book on Shakespeare.
Intellectuals have only ever been interested in stories as a quarry for various ideological agendas. They haven’t been concerned with stories in themselves. Therefore, their thinking about stories has been almost as worthless as thinking about music. The irony is that the average person who doesn’t think too hard about stories at all has a better understanding than the intellectual because the average person sees in a story what is really the core of it, namely, human being and transformation. To use a popular modern concept, the average person empathises with the hero of a story.
Nevertheless, it is true that the intellectual approach is not entirely without merit. The problem occurs when the intellect imposes itself on a story rather than following from an empathetic appreciation. The kind of thinking that is required to enhance our understanding of stories is empathy in the widest sense. We need not just feel with the hero for the story but think with them too. What problems do they face? What challenges? What opportunities excite them? The intellectual approach must begin as a kind of intellectual empathy.
Thinking about stories is synonymous with thinking about human nature. It must be holistic and integral in nature rather than the fractured approach of modern scholarship. It must also be iterative because only by repetition can we work our way from partial and incomplete understanding towards holistic and integral. First and foremost, though, it must stay focused on the story itself, and that means on the journey of transformation that the characters go through.
Quite by accident, I have been building my way towards a methodology of story interpretation over the last many years. In recent months, I have been trying to think of a name to give and the title Existential Hermeneutics popped into my head. Hermeneutics is the study of the interpretation of texts and existential is a reference to the existentialist movement in philosophy, which foregrounds human nature and experience. Thus, Existential Hermeneutics is a way to think about stories that begins with the human and only extrapolates from there to larger questions.
The next question I have been asking is how best to present these ideas. Earlier this year, I ran a couple of online study groups on King Lear and Hamlet, and I really enjoyed those. In addition, I have also participated in a couple of study groups run by others, which were also very rewarding. I found real-time discussion to be more lively and energising than the asynchronous nature of blog posts. Of course, it’s also the case that we now live in a world where blog posts are prime candidates for the industrial-scale IP theft ushered in by LLMs. Any new ideas placed in blog posts are only going to be stolen by big tech.
For these reasons and more, what I would like to do is to try another online study group to introduce the core ideas of Existential Hermeneutics, the study of how to think about stories. The basic concepts are as follows:-
- Story as transformation
- Transformation as a qualitative structure of time
- A basic model of identity
- Archetypes as stereotypical identity
- Archetypal identity change over time
- Identity of microcosm (hero) and macrocosm (world).
If all that sounds very abstract, fear not. I want to take a practical approach to the study group, introducing the concepts through exercises rather than theoretical reasoning. To facilitate that, we’ll engage with the concepts through the study of a story, but this time I’ll use something much simpler than Shakespeare, probably a Grimm fairy tale.
With that said, I would like to extend an invitation to all readers to participate in the inaugural short course on Existential Hermeneutics. It will run for six weeks. Each week there will be a short exercise to carry out and a brief theoretical overview for context. We’ll hold the discussion via a group text-based chat on Discord. I’d also very much like to try and organise one or more videoconference sessions to discuss the ideas in real-time, but these will be completely optional. Because I’m still learning how best to structure the material, there will be no payment required.
So, if you’d like to enhance your thinking about stories, you can register your interest here. I’ll follow up by email to organise the logistics.
Hi Simon,
Hmm. Music is experienced differently by us all, and I tend to enjoy the emotional content of the of the lyrics and melody. Also, I’d have to suggest that many musicians are most excellent story tellers. I mean, take Radiohead’s song ‘Creep’. It’s not transformative, but informative about the song writers view of himself relative to another person. But also at its heart, is a story which pushes on the emotions. It’s certainly not meant to be intellectually dissected, although that hardly stops people does it?
I remarked to you years ago, that my brain works in terms of stories. One of the reasons I began writing over a quarter of a century ago, was that I was in a position where I was having to explain complicated processes and situations to people who weren’t necessarily interested in hearing about it. We convey information to one another via the form of stories, that’s what our species does, and has done for a very long time. It’s a nice format which suits the deeper layers of our thinking.
You raised an interesting point about over-intellectualising stories, to which I agree. A few months ago, I read Stephen King’s most excellent book on the art of story telling and his art, titled: “On Writing”. It’s a good read. The author made the point that the story has to take precedence and be at the core of the end product. And I also agree with that observation. I begin writing with a situation or idea, and go from there – no great outline, but do try to ensure there is a natural flow, and that’s it. In order to explain things requires thinking on my feet, and quickly, thus the constant drilling of that skill. People can get lost in the detail, don’t you reckon? Thus your BS-o-meter going off at the interview. Hearing that waffle, I’d have floated away and done something else with my time. 🙂 If he wasn’t dead, you could send him a school report for the interview with the note: F-, could do better. 🙂
Back in early 2023 I went to see Florence and the Machine perform at Rod Laver, and man I just switched my brain off and enjoyed the emotional ride. Why not? That’s what the emotions are for.
If I may offer the observation, there are a large number of err, interests, pushing their own agendas through emotional content and warping of stories. We’re up to our eyeballs in such dross. Sad. The Scottish play (which you so named) is still being read centuries later, because at its heart is a good story, which reveals universal truths.
Cheers
Chris
Chris – the curious thing about music is how many vastly different settings there are for it. Think about the difference between an opera house with its incredibly sophisticated acoustics and a pub band room with the blunt instrument of a massive PA system. Then you’ve got countless variations on home hi-fi systems and headphones. Music can be background noise in a restaurant, street performances of vastly varying quality, intimate jazz clubs, massive arenas, etc. Each of these variables affect our perception and that’s before you even get into the different genres, instrument choices, etc.
Reminds me of possibly my favourite joke from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where that rock band’s music was so loud that it was best enjoyed from a concrete bunker on a neighbouring planet 😀
From a physical point of view, thinking about music in a linear way, like we do in stories is nonsensical. The human ear actually perceives frequencies, which means our hearing is in the frequency as opposed to the space domain.
A body can move through space in a line, but in the world of frequencies, only repetitions are visible, so a beginning, middle and end style of thinking will just not work, as at any given moment you hear all of space, but no point in particular.
That is to say, when you hear an individual note, you are hearing a pattern of air pressure that took some time to manifest, and in fact, often got mixed with the previous and next note, but your brain only tells you what cycles are present, not the time or place where they currently are, because asking “where” is a frequency is as nonsensical as “when” is it.
A story is the polar opposite of this – stories tend to be circular in the sense that we keep telling the same stories over and over again and we know the pattern – the hero transforms. But rather than looking at all possible repetitions on the “segment” that is the plot, we follow along the time axis and try to draw conclusions. We are in space, rather than frequency domain.
Bakbook – what about stories that are told orally? Those are also just frequencies hitting our ears 😉 It’s also the case that music does have a strong correlation to stories in the sense that there is a beginning, middle, and end. That is especially true during what we think of as the classical period (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven). If a piece is in the key of C, then it will start and finish in that key. The middle part is the journey, very similar to the hero’s journey of a story. Furthermore, the great composers had their own personal way to resolve harmonic progressions just as authors often have distinctive ways to end a story. If I was going to speculate in the same way as Bernstein, I would say that the “music faculty” is closely related to the “story faculty”.
Simon – It’s true we percieve this series of frequencies as notes that follow one another, but this is not an actual temporal progression.
However I agree this is a discussion of language and acknowlege you have a point that one can speak of the development of a “musical idea” with a begining, middle and end, but I have never seen anyone discussing the evolutiin of a piece of music in a non abstract way, that is to say, with actual characters and a transformation that can be underatood outside of the context of music itelf. Most stories however have a character that is relatable to humans even if it is not one and can teach us about the non story / medium world.
Agree. But I would add the important caveat that I made in the post. We can also discuss stories in an abstract way and then use those insights to enhance our appreciation and understanding of the story. That is what doesn’t happen with music. Knowing that a piece is following these melodic rules or those harmonic ones is interesting but doesn’t enhance our appreciation.