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May 05, 2008

The Meaning of Stories

I spent part of this morning in a home-school classroom, helping an eleven year-old English lad called Joshua to plan a fantasy story. Story-writing is part of the SATS, whatever they are, and fantasy is one of the required genres. Joshua was a natural, and ideas were not in short supply: he came up with the Mountains of Grindoom where lives the evil Lord Vladux; Hezron the knight, set to work as a slave in Lord Vladux's gold mine, his heroic escape to an underground river, his meeting with Clovely the friendly turtle and the turtle's gift of a set of wooden panpipes which, when played, summon the Magic Molluscs of Minsk. Plus a good helping of zombie villains, courtesy of last week's Doctor Who DVD!

Out of the imagination of an eleven year-old boy, Story appeared, original in many details and yet obeying all the archetypes: the Hero, the Villain, the Helper, the Quest, the Magic Gift. Compelling.
I've been thinking a lot about Story over the last few months, since receiving The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker as a Christmas present. It's a delicious 700-page tome, surveying the history of Story all across the world, from Beowulf to Batman and from Frankenstein to Frazier. Booker reckons that all stories follow one or more of the Seven Basic Plots: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy and Rebirth. But beyond these seven plots, he sees that there is a more Universal Story being played out. Here is a passage plucked out of the middle.

"The essential message of storytelling all over the world is that there are two centres to human nature: and that to become reunited with the totality of life it is necessary to make the long and difficult transition from one to the other. From our earliest years, the first point the unconscious tries to make through stories is that the greatest danger to the human race is its own capacity to think and to act egocentrically. This is why those first properly-formed stories which make sense to us as a child tend to show a little hero or heroine, much like ourselves, venturing out into a mysterious outside world, such as a great forest, where they encounter some terrifying dark figure: a witch, a giant, a wolf or some other monster. The purpose of this is to introduce the child to a personification of that dark power of egotism which it must learn to recognise as its most deadly enemy.

Initially this enemy is shown as something wholly external, and the point of such stories, as we saw, is simply to awaken the child's subconscious awareness to the fact that, in this strange new world it is entering, such a deadly power exists. But progressively, as we grow older, the message is filled out, as it conveys to us with greater subtlety and depth those qualities the hero or heroine must develop for them to reach the complete happy ending; not least when we come to those types of story which show the hero or heroine having to wrestle with that same dark power in themselves.

So, whether we respond to it or not, the constant feeding of our imagination with stories provides us with a unique mirror to the inner dynamics of human nature. Above all, below the level of our consciousness, the consistency of their symbolism gradually builds up an image of what the pattern of a human life can be, and what happens if we fail."
The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker, page 563

Charlie has been reading a similar book, by Christian author John Eldredge, called Epic: The Story God is Telling and the Role that is Yours to Play. Eldredge, like Booker, recognizes the Universal Root of the stories we tell ourselves:

"Every story, great and small, shares the same essential structure because every story we tell borrows its power from a Larger Story, a Story woven into the fabric of our being - what pioneer psychologist Carl Jung tried to explain as archetype, or what his more recent popularizer Joseph Campbell called myth.

All of these stories borrow from the Story. From Reality. We hear echoes of it through our lives. Some secret written on our hearts. A great battle to fight, and someone to fight for us. An adventure, something that requires everything we have, something to be shared with those we love and need.

There is a Story that we just can't seem to escape. There is a Story written on the human heart. As Ecclesiastes has it, 'He has planted eternity in the human heart' (3:11 NLT)

Look, wouldn't it make sense that if we ever did find the secret to our lives, the secret to the universe, it would come to us first as a story? Story is the very nature of reality. Like the missing parts of a novel, it would explain these pages we are holding, the chapters of our lives.

Second, it would speak to our hearts' deepest desires. If nature makes nothing in vain, then why the human heart? Why those universal longings and desires? The secret simply couldn't be true unless it contained the best parts of the stories that you love.

Yet it would need to go deeper and higher than any of them alone.

What if?

What if all the great stories that have ever moved you, brought you joy or tears - what if they are telling you something about the true Story into which you were born, the Epic into which you have been cast?"

Eldredge is onto something here. The 90-page pocket book Epic is very lightweight alongside the Seven Basic Plots megalith, but the vision it conjures is not dissimilar. A Story written on the human heart, an appreciation of human capacity to think and act egocentrically (and the self-destructive force of this), an image of what the pattern of the human life can be and a vision of some strange and wonderful rebirth.

The stories that move and inspire you, me and eleven year-old boys are not meaningless. Like it or not, we've all been cast into an epic.

Posted by sahelsteve at May 5, 2008 10:23 PM