In this house we adore the critic Parul Sehgal. Her recent article in the New Yorker, “The Tyranny of the Tale,” argues that storytelling has bled outside of its bounds. It needs to be taken to the laundry, brought back “starched,” because it’s been used “promiscuously.” She argues that there are great swaths of our experience that are ill-suited to the march of and then and then and then. The mundane daily stuff, the extremes of experience, the ambiguous—these are not easily compressed into narrative, into a string of cause and effect, into a beginning, middle, and an end. All these other things are straitjacketed or else ignored by our current paradigm.
Sehgal asks:
“What forms of attention does story crowd out?”
It’s worth reading her entire essay, as I won’t adequately summarize it here. In general I’ve found that Sehgal is excellent at describing what is too large in our culture to see all around the sides of.
I do not come away from reading “The Tyranny of the Tale” with a desire for fewer stories (at least within literature, although her point about how “story” is imposed on the realms of visual art and politics is well-taken). I come away, instead, with a desire for more varied stories. Story has so many shapes, and even within a neat superstructure of plot—the metabolic beginning, middle, and an end—there can be room for interlude, lyricism, breakdowns, formal experimentation, imperfection, indeterminacy, and mess.
And then, in a roundabout way, I thought about how Game of Thrones really fell off a cliff. I’m talking about the show, not the books. I still remember Zeynep Tufekci’s analysis in The Scientific American as to why the quality nosedived (like a dragon struck by a plot-magicked arrow), because of the distinction Tufekci draws between “psychological” and “sociological” storytelling. Most contemporary stories, she argues, are the former in mode: they focus on the choices of an individual. Game of Thrones (GoT), on the other hand, could kill off the “main” character without blinking, or even several “main” characters in a single red wedding, because it wasn’t really about Ned Stark, or [fill in the blank character]—it was about corruption, power, and so on. It was a portrait of a world, a society. Tufekci writes:
“In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life.”
Tufekci reasons that it was the sociological storytelling that made GoT stand out from all the rest, and in the later episodes, the showrunners’ attempt to steer GoT into a psychological-style narrative not only failed to match the style of the earlier seasons, and thereby the expectations of the audience—it couldn’t make good on George R.R. Martin’s series outline for the moral-downfall-of-Daenerys ending.
Why does it matter, beyond the decline of HBO into “MAX,” and the yet-unfinished A Song of Ice and Fire books? Tufekci contends that some storytelling modes are better suited to telling certain stories, and that’s what I find interesting, all these years after the unsatisfying burning of King’s Landing. Treading beyond Martin’s finished novels, the GoT showrunners returned (sloppily, what’s more) to the narrative paradigm of individual choice> consequences, to “storytelling” in the common way, ignoring the language of meaning the show had already created for itself.
I often repeat in class: no one is born in a vacuum. What paths your characters take in the narrative also reflect what paths they have—and did not have—access to. Their wants, the obstacles in their way, their assumptions and beliefs and biases—these are all influenced by their world and by their position in that world. It shapes their, and the narrative’s, point of view. Worldbuilding is not discrete from character-building. Character and world insist on each other, or else neither is real.
It’s an aspect of fiction I’ve been thinking about lately while reading The Dawn of Everything, a nonfiction book by David Graeber and David Wengrow, pitched as nothing less than “a new history of humanity;” more specifically, it traces the ways in which people have organized ourselves into political groups since the Stone Age, what freedoms different cultures have defined as basic human rights, and how hierarchies and inequalities have ossified. It’s ambitious and fascinating. At every turn, the writers keep in mind the fact that people, no matter what age they live in, are people who make choices at each turn. It seems an obvious point, but that simple reframing does upset many ideas retained from my political science undergraduate days. I wonder: Can fictional stories based in psychological realism broach these topics? Why should fiction worry about topics beyond the scale of the individual? Returning to Tufekci (hyperlink mine):
“In a historic moment that requires a lot of institution building and incentive changing (technological challenges, climate change, inequality and accountability) we need all the sociological imagination we can get…”
This is Collected Fictions.
So perhaps you feel like writing a sociological story. Perhaps you even feel like telling one in which people organize themselves in very different ways from the current forms. Perhaps you feel like writing a story that uses modes that downplay “story,” in terms of the focus on what’s next? An unusual, surprising story. How might you go about it?
One place I would look, generally, is to the wealth of writing in other languages, which tends to be riskier or just different1 in structure and plot. (Translators are everything and I love you all.)2
Han Kang’s polyphonic novel Human Acts is structured oddly. It may have as easily been labeled a short story collection, although that term doesn’t quite feel right either, because the individual chapters wouldn’t have the same hold when read out of their context. Some don’t really complete an arc on their own, or navigate the turn of an epiphany, as a short story might be expected to perform. The point of view switches with each of the six chapters—I’m inclined to call them “sections” (plus epilogue), veering widely in tone, style (as the translator Deborah Smith notes in the introduction), focus, and point-in-time. The glue that binds the sections is a real historical event: the violent suppression of the Gwangju Uprising in Korea, 1980. The fragmented (exploded?)3 story structure provides Kang the chorus with which to depict the confusion, complexity, and long-ranging effects of the massacre. Much like the uprising was diverse (a student and a worker uprising, and simultaneously a site of woman’s rights activism) the voices can speak on multiple fronts. Considering Sehgal’s point that narrative is often weaponized by the state as propaganda, I view this structure as a strategy to escape containment. A story that is not easily summarized is also not easily twisted. The structure produces a type of attention that is less propellant than the traditional single arc, but I can’t shake the emotions it surfaced in my reading, some months ago.4
The speculative element in Human Acts, if you were wondering, is the speculative element that is most common in literature: the ghost. The first section is narrated by a boy; he moves bodies into the gymnasium, where people gather searching for their loved ones. He is searching for his friend. The second section is narrated by the boy’s friend, who is—as feared—dead. The ghost narrates as his body is thrown into a mass grave. There is not a turn at which the ghost has agency to change his situation, or the course of events. The narrative does not truly progress, although the bodies pile, suggesting a sort of movement. But time is not the movement, because the writing is not leaning on the narrative reveal. What is this energy, generated but burning in a strange fashion?
Returning to “The Tyranny of the Tale,” and Parul Sehgal:
“The poet Yusef Komunyakaa writes of “the days when a man / would hold a swarm of words / inside his belly, nestled / against his spleen, singing.”
Swarm, not story: when a heroine in Elena Ferrante’s work loses the plot or floats free from it, it is that very word she reaches for—“swarm.”
…A swarm possesses its own discipline but moves untethered. Nothing about the notion of a swarm comforts or consoles. It doesn’t contain, like a story. It allows—contradiction, dissonance, doubt, pure immanence, movement, an open destiny, an open road.”
Non-contemporaries are also wonderful in this regard. See also: indie publishers, as well as of course poetry and hybrid forms.
And if “the reading of an sf story is always an active process of translation,” as Gwyneth Jones writes in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, then the translation of speculative fiction is all the more impressive still.
For further reference: Jane Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, a craft book which lays out alternative narrative structures to the single climax arc drawn from natural forms.
Sadly I’ve since lost my copy, and haven’t yet replaced it, so no annotations this letter.