Beyond Storytelling

David Morris bemoans the fact that the world of literary fiction has increasingly become a woman’s world. To some extent, he is right. To another extent, one feels compelled to point out that the best selling authors of fiction have traditionally been women-- as in Agatha Christie and J. K. Rowling. 

And let’s not forget that among the earliest great novelists we find women like Jane Austin and George Eliot and Virginia Wolff.

How the almighty patriarchy allowed this to happen, I will not attempt to surmise.

Anyway, literary fiction is fast becoming a pink ghetto. Roughly the same is happening with therapy. 

Morris does not ask the salient question here: where are the men who are not majoring in English literature? You know the answer: they are studying STEM subjects, computers and business.

But this also suggests that women are less interested in preparing to work in the real world and more interested in creating alternative worlds. You cannot, dare I say, do both.

It obviously matters that literary agents and editors are almost exclusively female. It also matters that the women who hold these positions, according to Morris, will not even look at a submission proposed by a white male.

Many female authors do not even try to reach a male audience. I recall picking up a novel written by an author I admire. The opening pages involved the central character choosing which dress to wear to a dinner. Sad to say, I cannot relate. I did not care about her travails over dress selection. So, several pages in, I closed the book.

According to Morris I was missing out on a chance to enhance my capacity for empathy. And yet, as has been shown by scientists, if you want to grow the empathy circuits in your brain you should get pregnant. If you are not going to get pregnant-- for whatever reason-- you are out of luck.

Now Morris believes that literary fiction is the antidote to Trumpism. No kidding:

These young men need better stories — and they need to see themselves as belonging to the world of storytelling. Novels do many things. They entertain, inspire, puzzle, hypnotize. But reading fiction is also an excellent way to improve one’s emotional I.Q. Novels help us form our identities and understand our lives. 

Obviously, there is more to life than storytelling. There is gamesmanship-- which involves working in the business world, not to mention manufacturing and industry, along with politics. One understands that your emotional IQ is of less import in the real world than it is in the worlds of fiction.

Morris bemoans the fact that men do not have proper empathy for women. He does not ask whether women understand the games that are being played in the business world. He is wrong to think that empathy is the magic sauce that will improve the way men and women get along. 

He fails to remark that if women prefer to study fictional worlds they will be ill prepared to function in the marketplace, the arena, the government or even on the battlefield. 

For example, if all you know is storytelling, you will not attempt to solve problems. You will imagine that you need merely offer a different story, that is, different messaging. 

Similarly, if you practice therapy as storytelling you will imagine that revising and reconstructing the story of your life will change who you are and will relieve you of your problems. Presumably, they will then become someone else’s problems.

And yet, you do not need to have done very much advanced study to recognize that the value of literary fiction does not depend on any reality checks. When you are working in the world, reality checks are basic to your actions. They affirm or deny the quality of your work.

Stories have structure. So do social interactions. Unfortunately, the structures are not the same. You might think, at a time when the social fabric is shredding, when people seem incapable of functioning as a group or getting along with each other, that you can solve the problem by taking up residence in a fictional world, a world defined by a story.

If you are a born-again Hegelian,  you might imagine that history is a grand narrative. You might then imagine that it’s all been written out in advance, awaiting realization. Some serious thinkers believe that the future belongs to liberal democracy and that it must prevail because history will naturally be realized. The question then is simply getting on the right side of history. 

If, however, life is a game with the outcome determined by the different moves that the different players make, then your skill at storytelling will not serve you well. It will tell you not to bother to play the game.

In the meantime, the truth is, there is more to literary fiction than storytelling. 

Literature involves the use of language. It involves teaching moral lessons. It teaches us how to speak cogently and coherently. It helps us to learn how to use language to formulate thought and to engage in human social interactions. 

Empathy does not suffice. People get along in society because they accept the different roles that they and others play. And they follow the rules that pertain to those roles. Those rules involve responsibility and duty. 

As I have tried to offer in these pages, how you feel matters less than what you say, how you say it, to whom you say it. The American people have just rejected a presidential candidate who was incapable of formulating a coherent sentence in the English language. How could she lead if she could not speak clearly and directly?

We might well say that men ought to develop such skills. We might say that they can do so by studying literature. As long as they learn that there is more to life than telling stories, they will not be tempted to cover up their failings with stories. 

We saw it during the recent presidential campaign. The media created a fictional narrative about the competent and accomplished Kamala. And yet, the more people saw her the more they recognized that it was all a pack of lies. 

And the additional efforts of the media and the Democratic Party to wrap Donald Trump in a hysterical apocalyptic narrative ultimately failed. After all, Trump had been president before and the world did not end during his presidency.

The reality check worked. 

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