“Far-li-mas, therefore, was summoned. He appeared, and the king said: ‘The day has arrived when you must cheer me. Tell me a story.’
‘The performance is quicker than the command,’ said Far-li-mas, and he began.
The king listened to the story; the guests also listened. The king and his guests forgot to drink, forgot to breathe. The servants forgot to serve. They, too, forgot to breathe. For the art of Far-li-mas was like hashish, and, when he had ended, all were as though enveloped in a delightful swoon. The king had forgotten his thoughts of death. Nor had any realized that they were being held from twilight until dawn, but when the guests departed, they found the sun in the sky.”
-The Legend of the Destruction of Kash1
The episode above is from a myth recorded in Sudan in 1912. And while its opioid imagery may be strange to us, we have all had a similar experience of being so completely caught up in a story that we were “as though enveloped in a delightful swoon.” Whether the tale began, “Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles,” or “Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps,” something in the words captivated us, drew us in, and held us spellbound.2 We found ourselves transported in time and space, perhaps to the distant past or worlds never before imagined. And like the audience of Far-li-mas, we forgot to eat or drink. We held our breaths, fearful of the outcome, then looked up from the dazzled page to find that many hours had passed.
How does this happen? How do mere words whisk us away to Elsinore or Los Angeles – to glide beneath the waves with Nemo or soar upon a hippogriff with Juss? How does the storyteller engage our emotions so that suddenly it matters to us very much whether Frodo destroys the ring or Robert Jordan blows up his bridge? Why do we weep over Emma Bovary or rejoice with Dorothea Brooke? What do we talk about when we talk about stories?
In posing such questions, we are not inquiring as to what makes a work of literature good or bad. What we seek is more fundamental and perhaps more elusive. What is a story? How does it charm us to forget the real world and live within its pages? How has it endured as an art form from prehistoric times until the present? To answer such riddles, we must consult experts in the field. But, since stories happen as much between our ears as between the covers of our books, we’ll also cast a passing glance at recent revelations from the field of neuroscience.
Perhaps we fear looking too deeply into such mysteries. When the lights have dimmed and the illusionist is performing, we want to believe. We fear the meddling intellect and dread to find our faith betrayed by mere sleight of hand. But since the days of antiquity, critics have been blundering backstage, inspecting the levers on the deus-ex-machina engine and rapping on the sides every word-hoard to find if it sounds hollow or sublime. We need not glance away from such investigations. For storytelling is true magic, and no critical interrogation can ever dispel its glamour.
Once upon a time, we told our stories like Far-li-mas. Our audience gathered around while we chanted or sang or told our tales more simply. We find such oral performers even still in many cultures and embedded in the earliest written narratives. For example, Homer tells us of the blind bard Demodokos, “The herald came near, bringing with him the excellent singer whom the Muse had loved greatly, and gave him both good and evil. She reft him of his eyes, but she gave him the sweet singing art…and the greatest of the Phaiakians would urge him to sing, since they joyed in his stories.”3
However, some six thousand years ago, the invention of the written word changed civilization and the art of storytelling forever. Just how remarkable this creative leap was, we are only just beginning to realize. Neuroscientists tell us that there is a speech center of the brain and an area of the brain where visual images are processed. There is no similar region for reading, no “reading center” in the brain. Each reader must learn to forge a link between their eyes and ears in order to read.4 As E. B. Huey put it, “To completely analyze what we do when we read would almost be the acme of the psychologist’s achievements, for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind.”5
The brain’s tremendous plasticity and ability to form new pathways is astonishing, but it is not the only revelation neuroscience presents when it comes to reading. When we read, visual symbols activate our brains’ auditory and language centers. That is, we hear the words in our head even when we read silently from the page. But the flow of information runs both ways. The words we read trigger additional activity in the visual and auditory centers so that we see and hear the events depicted in the story. Just as when we dream, we encounter what the characters in the tale we are reading experience. The frenzied mob surrounds us as Sidney Carton approaches the guillotine, and the typhoon that terrifies Genji in his exile roars just as loudly to our inner ear.6
The “mind’s eye,” then, turns out to be more than a natty rhetorical accessory. To our delight, a good yarn truly makes us see things in a way that our current science verifies. And, perhaps, this holds the key to the ability of Far-Li-Mas and tale-tellers down the ages to hold us spellbound.
Aristotle once remarked that human beings enjoy imitating and that we take pleasure from imitations.7 When we stand before some great painting of the masters like Rembrandt’s Night Watch, we experience this in one way. We realize that merely through pigments daubed with skill on a canvas, the artist has captured and reproduced a range of recognizable human characters and emotions.
Stories create the same effect with words that project their imitations on the silver screens of our imaginations. They are inward incantations that paint for us dreamworlds in our minds. And, as in the dreams that come to us in the night, there is a pleasurable ambiguity of identity. We know we are ourselves, yet we begin to experience this vivid alternate reality from another’s perspective. Their thoughts, which might never have occurred to us, pop into our heads as we turn the page. Their problems become ours, and so also their joys, defeats, and victories.
Narratives, then, allow us to dress up in another’s personality and circumstances. Moreover, once we have pretended to be someone else in the safe space of the fictive dream, we are more likely to be open to other points of view in the real world. The Dutch scholar Jemeljan Hakemulder found “that fiction has positive effects on reader’s moral development and sense of empathy.”8
More than one practitioner of this art has also sounded this theme. Tolstoy made “shared experience” the touchstone of his aesthetic system.9 George Eliot once wrote, “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.”10
And finally, down into our own time, novelist Ursula K. Leguin tells us, “It seems common sense that fact should be our common ground. But, in fact, fact is hard to come by, so dependent on point of view, so debatable, that we may be more likely to meet a shared reality in fiction. By telling a story…we open the door to the imagination. And imagination is the best, maybe the only way we have to know anything about each other’s minds and hearts.”11
Perhaps the reason that stories matter, then, is that the telling of tales is a communal and community-building endeavor. Until the end of history, we will always need a Far-li-mas to summon us to the fictive dreamworld. When we look into the pages of our books, we encounter not merely figures of our imaginations, but each other as well. And when we glance up from the page at last, we will find the sun in the sky.
Like this post? Check out my published work here!
Notes
- Campbell, Joseph, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Penguin Books USA, Inc. p.295
- Woodrell, Daniel, Winter’s Bone, Little, Brown, and Company p. 2
- Homer, The Odyssey, Richmond Lattimore Tr. Harper Collins Books, p.122
- Wolf, Maryanne, Proust and the Squid, Harper Perennial, p.24ff
- Wolf, p. ix
- Gottschall, Jonathan, The Storytelling Animal, Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt p.58 ff
- Aristotle, Poetics, Anthony Kenny Tr. Oxford University Press, p.65
- Gottschall, p.135
- Tolstoy, Leo, What Is Art, Aylmer Maude Tr. Public Domain, p.35 ff.
- Kzznaric, Roman, Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It, A Perigee Book, p.145
- LeGuin, Ursula K., Words Are My Matter, First Mariner Books, p.117
What We Talk About When We Talk About Stories. Copyright Jonathan Golding 2024. All Rights Reserved.
Artwork: Artist Unknown
Worlds Imagined 