what can we learn from stories?
personal log // entry 0011
sol 434
Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control…in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.
— Chinua Achebe
Stories are telepathy. So writes my favorite author, Stephen Edwin King, in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. They are the closest thing we have to magic, he says, and I’m inclined to agree. What other method is there to so clearly and vividly paint a picture in someone’s mind, one laden with emotional and ideological weight? Storytellers are actively incepting ideas into the minds of their readers/listeners/viewers/players, often without being aware of it at all. The pen vs. the sword and all that; a cliché that writers like me take as a truism, but there’s undeniably truth to the idea that you will always change more minds with words than bullets.
As a fiction writer, I have a vested interest in this subject, namely in the idea that telling stories is both a worthwhile pursuit and a powerful tool of shaping people’s minds. I hope to make a career out of it, after all. But I often feel the need to defend my conviction to be a storyteller to those who share my political views, who sometimes see my realized raison d’être as trivial. I don’t have anything to prove to them, but I do want to explain why I believe stories and storytellers are necessary and vital, and why radical leftists should place more stock in them.
Karl Marx posited the theory of a dualistic society, the base and the superstructure; the economic and productive forces that a society is built on, and the cultural support for those forces. These two halves feed into one the other to perpetuate the status quo. We leftists, especially those of us who study Marxist and post-Marxist theory, do a lot of talking about the base, but I feel we often neglect to address the superstructure in any meaningful way other than to acknowledge its existence and its usefulness to the ruling elite, such as in manufacturing consent. But I think this is something social liberals often understand better than leftists; the true power that stories can have.
Stories can present an idealized world, something to strive for (very common of religious texts) or they can be cautionary tales, presenting a possible world which we should learn from so we can avoid moving toward (Nineteen Eighty-Four, Black Mirror). They can present our world as it is or was, with only a bit of artistic flair (The Martian, To Kill a Mockingbird), or they can present a world which does not exist, but which we can learn lessons from (The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars).
The job of the storyteller is, first and foremost, to tell a compelling story. This should be obvious. But the power of stories to not just entertain, but communicate an idea, should be second in any storyteller’s mind. There is so much potential to promote a moral lesson, or an abstract concept, or even an entire worldview, and storytellers would be negligent to ignore that potential, because those consuming it and internalizing it certainly won’t. They will find meaning where there is none, because that’s what humans do; we find patterns everywhere, even where none exist.
It’s therefore vitally important to remember is that every story is saying something, whether its author intended it or not. The author of any story, no matter the format or medium, must be aware of what their story is saying — because their reader will always take something away from it. When I write, I make a conscious effort to ensure my stories aren’t saying something I wouldn’t personally want to say. When I say the stories are ‘saying’ something, I mean the themes and messages the story communicates to its audience, both textual and subtextual. Death of the author is in full swing here. Different people will inevitably read into the same story and come to very different conclusions; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a warning against humans playing god, when in reality it was meant as an indictment of irresponsible parents. Who is wrong here? I’d argue no one is.
J.K. Rowling may not have intended for Harry Potter to carry any subtextual themes of transphobia, but upon further examination in recent light of her misinformed and damaging views, it becomes clear the seeds for it were always there. I mentioned Orwell’s magnum opus earlier, but that book is so notorious for being misinterpreted that there are countless memes mocking the trend. And I shudder to think how many people are blissfully unaware of the Randian Objectivist philosophy Trojan-horsed into their superhero movies thanks to Zack Snyder. These authors all have their own personal views, and the degree to which they intended their views to leak into their work is variable, but it doesn’t really matter when their views are getting across anyway.
The job of the storyteller is, first and foremost, to tell a compelling story. This should be obvious. But the power of stories to not just entertain, but communicate an idea, should be second in any storyteller’s mind.
I paraphrased Stephen King earlier with a quote from On Writing. In that book, he was specifically referring to writing, one of the purest forms of telepathy, but this logic applies to all forms of storytelling. Truly, stories are magic — which technically makes storytellers wizards, since we create them and harness their elemental power. I like to think so, anyway. But if we are indeed harnessers of such mental sorcery, then we need to make sure we’re using our power not just simply ‘for good’, but to inspire and challenge those who hear us to look at the world in new and more complex ways. If you want to change the world — because the world ain’t gonna change itself — that change starts with ideas, and ideas are spread by stories…so spread consciously.
Echo out.
