We Are Our Stories

Saturday, May 29

This morning I started reading this new collection of essays by Salman Rushdie. And the very first one, “Wonder Tales,” is about our vast appetite for stories, an appetite that awakens in our early childhood and doesn’t really return to slumber until we are no more.

Rushdie does assert that for many people (too many these days?) the appetite evanesces for good, long before those people do.

“For some of them,” he writes, “stories began to seem irrelevant, unnecessary: kids’ stuff. These were sad people, and we must pity them and try not to think of them as stupid boring philistine losers” (4).

A bit harsh? But maybe true?

But he goes on to say: “I believe that books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, that the act of falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, that the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of the world, a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives” (Ibid.).

He says that our falling in love with too few books throughout our lives could explain why “we make so many bad judgments” (Ibid.).

But—I was thinking as I read these passages—stories come in more than one form: films, plays, TV shows, sporting events (isn’t part of the appeal of a baseball game that we can never be sure what will happen? Never be sure how it will end?).

My last question makes me think of a baseball novel I loved, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1968) by W. P. Kinsella (who wrote another baseball novel that became the popular film Field of Dreams). As you baseball fans know, a baseball game, theoretically, need not ever end, and so it goes in this novel, inning by inning ...

But Rushdie is clearly right that stories have been with us from the beginning and continue to be a major part of our lives. The tales we tell at work, at school, around the dinner table. Conversation that lacks the rhythm and pace and arc of a story is invariably boring—even a dull story is better than no story.

Stories come in endless variety. Stories on TV news, on TV shows (where writers of British mysteries seem to have a boundless bag full of murder plots!).

People at the coffee shop are full of tales.

And need I even mention the Internet and social media?

Or blogs?

It’s no doubt true that fewer people these days are reading serious, literary fiction. But, to be fair, much “serious, literary fiction” has become exclusive, difficult to read, aimed at a far narrower audience that those folks that Dickens and Trollope and Jane Austen wrote for.

Shakespeare, who was very popular in his day (1564-1616), was careful to aim some parts of plays (even some entire plays themselves—e.g., The Merry Wives of Windsor) at the rowdier parts of his crowds. Hamlet has the Gravedigger; King Lear, the Fool.

So ... stories go on, in ever-evolving formats. But writers now well know that popularity means cash. And fewer of them now are interested in writing novels, plays, etc. that are well reviewed but sell poorly.