A couple of weeks ago, I put out an invitation for readers to partake in a short online study group about how to interpret stories, using Shakespeare’s classic King Lear as the text. This was an idea that had been in the back of my mind for some time, but I hadn’t fleshed it out in any great detail. So, I decided I should actually sit down and put some structure to it.
As part of that exercise, I thought I should check to see if somebody else has already thought of something similar. Given the ubiquity of stories in our lives, especially the stories of Shakespeare, which are taught in every high school, somebody must have written a useful guide on interpretation. I spent more than an hour searching online and was quite stunned by the poor quality of what is available. Even well-known literary critics like Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye miss some themes that to me are very obvious. The question is, why are there no good guides on understanding stories, even for the works of Shakespeare?
I’d already half-guessed the answer to this by realising that there is no academic discipline dedicated to the study of stories, but I hadn’t fully grasped the reason for this. Now, I think I’ve finally got it.
The first thing to note is that telling stories is an everyday activity. Everybody does it without even thinking. This seems to be a universal of human culture and must be innate in the same way as language itself. We need no formal instruction to acquire our native tongue, and we need no education on telling stories. We just do it.
However, scholarly disciplines such as literature and literary criticism have not concerned themselves with this everyday kind of storytelling. Rather, they have focused their attention on the stories told by novelists, poets, playwrights, etc. In short, they study art. Art is concerned with fictional stories, while the everyday stories that all of us tell are almost always real things that happened. Stories can be factual or fictional, but theoretical approaches have always focused on the latter category.
The foundational text, which is still worth reading to get some understanding of how stories work, is Aristotle’s Poetics. But the word “poetica” in Greek simply meant “to make”. There’s a difference between telling a story based on what actually happened and making one up. The latter is a deliberate, skilled activity. The former is instinctual and automatic.
Aristotle was was concerned with made up stories. More specifically, however, he was interested in Greek theatre performances, and those were not just stories. They included music, acting, stage design, etc. The philosopher grasped that the stories being told had structure to them, but he saw the story as just one aspect of the overall artistic creation.
And that’s the way it has been ever since. The intellectual disciplines that have given some attention to stories have seen the story aspect as one part of the analysis, and not even the most important part. That’s why even modern disciplines like literature are not primarily concerned with stories, and that’s why there is no discipline that concerns itself solely with stories as the object of study.
In summary, if we look at the history of how we have understood stories in Western culture, we find that everyday storytelling has received no attention at all, works of art have been studied in order to understand how they function, and, in general, philosophers, scientists, and other logical thinkers have seen stories as either pleasant diversions or outright fabrications, not as vehicles for truth. To the extent that it has been acknowledged that stories can convey truth, it’s always the result of some kind of quasi-mystical, religious gift ascribed to the artist.
What if we set aside these millennia of biases? What if we start with the proposition that stories have a structure and discrete set of properties that hold regardless of whether the story is a true account or a fictional creation? If this were true, then a story told by Shakespeare would have the same form as one told by a beer drinker down the pub on a Friday evening. The quality would be very different, but the form would be the same.
This realisation of why nobody has bothered to study stories in themselves has unblocked some difficulties I’ve been struggling with over the last several months in relation to my next book project. I now have the premise of the book sorted. It will entail a full description of what a story is and then the application of that definition to Shakespeare’s greatest works. The working title is “The Journey into the Sacred: Shakespeare and the Story of Life”.
Now that the concept is unblocked, I’d like to strike while the iron is hot and concentrate on writing the book. As a result, I’ll be taking a month away from blogging. All going well, I’ll be back in the middle of February.
Meanwhile, I’m pleased to say that we seem to have the numbers for the first study group on King Lear. I’m now extra motivated for that since it should give me some real-time feedback on whether my definition of a story makes sense. For those who have already put their name down, I’ll be in touch in the next week to get things moving. There’s still space for anybody else who wants to join in. You can find the overview of the idea here and the sign-up form here.
Otherwise, see you in mid-February.