A Case for Stories
Illustration by Breah Johnson
Isn’t fiction all fantasy, all wings? Wrung from imagination, driven only by air and things nobody would test us for.
Over and over I’ve come back to this image: my class from 6th grade, or was it 7th, 5th, or from a time I haven’t yet been to? Their faces too close and too distant while I speak. What am I speaking about? That’s it: it’s love, it’s understanding, respect, circling back to what humans carry in the bone: stories. Stories as a channel for them, for all of it. More than imagining my own voice I hear mutters, disdain and dismissal.
By the time children are old enough to work not on instinct but on imparted knowledge, their stories are derailed and taken away from them. Just the right amount of vulnerability and consciousness to point them somewhere away from the land of rainbows and enchanted castles, the “inconsequential,” the fleeting, to the factual and grounded. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a definitively prophetic novel expands upon this:
With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. [. . .] We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.¹
That’s why reading is a practice. More than water you’re born into with fins and gills, but a process of growing into it, the fear, the lack of answers, the big startling blue, the ripples, and the answer filling your mouth. Adaptation to—more than suspension in—the universe. Humanity’s unique condition, for better or for worse, is choice, that look in the eyes as you turn something over, right or wrong, the act with the gun in it at arm’s length but no one choosing to pick it up.
Fiction, in this way, extends choice—through relating to your life: what choices can you make; should you; at what cost? and through presenting other lives: what choices do people living in wartime, people grieving, and uncertain people have?
It expands beyond theories, facts, proofs: typically square containers put around something as fluid as water, as blood—that is life—forgetting that the world inevitably turns cold, water condenses and breaks any ideas one had about walls, glass, what it means to be here and have this life. It dares you—beyond the black and white of ink. Thinking back on Ian Malcolm’s “Life… finds a way,”² I realize how much of fiction is just a practice in finding a way. Fiction is life.
Brian Boyd writes, “Individual memory first evolved because sufficient regularities exist in the world for roughly similar situations to recur frequently. But since situations never repeat exactly, minds need to match similarities loosely.”3 Narratives explore both this looseness and similarity; you realize when you read that someone somewhere has felt as much of a wounded animal as you did, as hopeful, as terrified, as stubborn.
Stories and fiction call for you to read between the lines. The spaces between words, worlds, themes, consequence makes for breath-work: understanding how other people breathe and live, the space your breath takes, what makes it hitch, what makes it easy. Which, I’d argue, is the heart of all of life: the emotional, interpersonal, executive, perceptual, religious, all of it, all of it…
Stories are fate, narrative is nothing short of its own god. They put characters and perspectives next to each other, make them scream and touch, draw them together for us to see, to feel—in all our uncertainty and hope—one way or the other to the end. Ray Bradbury, whom I can’t help but come back to, wrote:
“All is not lost, of course. There is still time if we judge teachers, students, and parents, hold them accountable on the same scale, if we truly test teachers, students, and parents, if we make everyone responsible for quality, if we insure that by the end of its sixth year every child in every country can live in libraries to learn almost by osmosis, then our drug, street-gang, rape, and murder scores will suffer themselves near zero. But the Fire Chief, in mid-novel, says it all, predicting the one-minute TV commercial with three images per second and no respite from the bombardment. Listen to him, know what he says, then go sit with your child, open a book, and turn the page.”⁴
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in weaving together of a person (a monster?), presents Nature vs. Nurture before the readers, without stagnancy, like information, but with fluidity, nuance, and most important of all, humanity, like a life. As Eleanor Soloto writes, “Frankenstein startlingly shows that identity is a fiction to shore up the dismemberment of the ‘I.’”⁵ Later, she says, “In this text about self-representation, Shelley articulated that the notion of the subject is not a single one positing any one definitive meaning or message; rather, the subject is multiple and shifting.”
The winter I read Frankenstein was a time I saw as fragmented, where I didn’t know myself, how I felt. The world seemed frozen in the moment after the ice breaks, although we had no ice, no mapped-out world. Yet that winter was the first time I felt I had the time to stand under the giant tree in our backyard, nearly completely wet with dew from the night, and heard it patter down and fall before and over me. The first time I nearly cried hearing it, leaf to leaf, but wholly rooted.
What if Frankenstein had been loved? What if, what if, what if?
Like Frankenstein, or like Jo March, or Ronan Lynch, Alice, Liesel Meminger, fiction comes together over and over. For once, we see a reflection of ourselves the way we are—fragments, ships sailing in the night, uncertain, transient, and human.
In the end, fiction and stories touch some primal instinct in us, as materializations and exploration of ourselves through the ages. It’s more raw than any computer-generated knowledge or axiomatic formula. “Odysseus is both the ultimate explorer, who in that sense represents all human curiosity—and we are the most curious species on Earth—and the personification of the desire to return home, which drives the whole narrative of the Odyssey.” The raw is what we work with. It’s not something we can lose. Because we hear of a million fishes dying, or fifty thousand or two of our neighbors’, but it’s not the same as watching a single fish snatched from his father. Because hearing “a woman suffering” is not the same as:
When [Franz] was twelve, [Franz’s mother] suddenly found herself alone, abandoned by Franz’s father. […] The day his father left, Franz and his mother went into town together, and as they left home Franz noticed that her shoes did not match. He was in a quandary: he wanted to point out her mistake, but was afraid he would hurt her. So during the two hours they spent walking through the city together he kept his eyes fixed on her feet. It was then he had his first inkling of what it means to suffer.⁶
Because life moves, will always move, not only through facts with a hard, cold face, but with individual hearts, circumstances, love. Love! Hearing about “the real world” is hard enough when you’re trying to make it better. We live most of our lives lost in the mundane, and then we lose hold of it, why not make it beautiful? W. H. Auden wrote:
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.⁷
Perspective, narrative, womb, deathbed. And the magnificence of all of it, of everything in between. To not turn away from the disaster but to understand the disaster written into life, love it, listen to it, trace its footsteps, and take the other way.
If stories are driven by air, no heart has anyway ever lived without it.
¹ Bradbury, R. (1953). Fahrenheit 451. Ballantine Books.
²Jurassic Park. (1993). Directed by Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures.
³ Boyd, B. (2009). On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjf9xvk
⁴ Bradbury, R. (2013). Fahrenheit 451. Harper Voyager. (Original work published 1953)
⁵ Salotto, E. (1994). Frankenstein and Dis(re)membered Identity. The Journal of Narrative Technique, 24(3), 190–211. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30225415
⁶ Kundera, M. (1984). The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Harper & Row.
⁷ Auden, W. H. (1938). Musée des Beaux Arts. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43929/musee-des-beaux-arts-56d223e56c38e
