Telling Stories

I’ve been thinking lately about how stories affect us. I’m not thinking principally of stories-with-a-moral, like Aesop’s Fables. I’m thinking about do-you-remember-the-time-we… stories.

Stories are “nomic” agents as Peter Berger likes to say, or “ordering” agents.[1] There are three nomic mechanisms available to us. There are the principles, like “stealing is wrong.” You level your own behavior against that that rule and see how you look. There is no disagreement that our thoughts and relationships are ordered by principles and rules.

There are stories which have the principal function of illustrating some rule or other. I said I think of Aesop’s Fables as a good example. My mother used to read the story of the (harmless) stork who was trapped in a net set for the (harmful) crows, but who deserved his fate, in a way, because…wait for it…”You are known by the company you keep.” I was a mouthy kid and, if I had had the wit, I would have responded, “Wow! What bad news for Jesus!” But I didn’t.

Then there are the other stories, which are the ones I want to consider today. We tell the stories we like to tell and both the telling and the hearing affect us. And why do we like the stories we like? Some are just fun to tell. Some evoke a good time of our lives or a good event. Some, we say, we “resonate with,” which is a powerful, if obscure, way to characterize them.

Paraphrasing Aesop, I think I’ll say that we are known by the stories we tell. Further, I think there is a sense in which we even know ourselves by the stories we tell. How can this be?

First, stories are told from a point of view. There are, for instance, “victim stories,” and “winner stories;” there are “benefactor stories” and “beneficiary stories.” Which ones have resonance with us tells a lot about either who we are or, at least, where we are in our lives at the moment.[2] It is more than that, though. It is also that the characters in these stories serve to attract us or repel us. If I like to tell “beneficiary stories,” for instance, the good guys are the people who provided the benefits, and the people who noticed that I might need some. I am not, in these stories, the prodigal who has squandered his 401(k); I am only a person who was in need of help at some point and who was delighted to receive it. My guess is that makes me more attentive to situations where I could be the source of beneficence and might even make me less likely to be judgmental of a person who could use a little help. You’d like to think it would work that way.

But when I started this, I was thinking about the effects of stories on groups. Maybe family groups. I have always liked to hear and tell Hess stories. The women I have married have liked to tell the old Way and Miller and Brendle stories and, over time, some of the Hess stories in which they have played a part. Or college years stories. Do you remember what we found under the ivy on one of those ivy covered walls? I love all those and they bear on who “we,” whatever “we” is on our minds at the moment, are.

Some stories tell about an “us” that extends back in time a long way. Does “David v. Goliath” still affect us?[3] Does the old Kemmis family story of a defiant wife during the colonies’ revolutionary turmoil still affect the Kemmises of Missoula Montana? Of course it does. Does the old story of the Anabaptist fugitive who turned back to save his pursuer from drowning still affect Anabaptists? Yes, it does. Does Galileo’s defiance of papal authority still cause fans of the Enlightenment to salivate? Yes, it does. And no one I know saw “Cap’n John” Kemmis’s wife rebuke the British or the Anabaptist pay with his life for his compassion to an enemy or Galileo defy the church. How do these stories affect us? I mean, by what means do these stories affect us?

I have three means in mind. These three means are what I am calling the second way stories affect us. The first, remember, was the choice of point of view. Let me lay them out and you can turn them over in your mind and see if they make sense. I got these from an old book, too.[4] Snell and Gail Putney say that we need others as our mirrors, our models, and as the receivers of our actions. I have worked with that simple little three-part division for a long time now and it very often brings clarity.

Following this line of thought, “our stories”—the stories that belong to some “us” that extends over a very long time—affect us by providing mirrors, models, and recipients. Let’s imagine, for instance, that I have been told Hess family stories my whole life. The Hesses in these stories come off looking pretty good. If you are a member of a multigenerational family with a sense of itself, that won’t surprise you. My paternal grandfather, Abram Z. Hess, was, according to the story that has been passed down, strongly opposed to the building of a platform in their church. I suspect he thought it was incipient elitism. They discussed it a long time and then voted. He lost. So he showed up the next morning as part of the work party that had assembled to build the platform.

This isn’t an Aesop-style story, but as I identify with the only clearly drawn character in the story, I imagine his indignation at this stupid idea and his frustration at being on the losing side. I reflect on what he did with those feelings so that he could whole-heartedly affirm the generous collegiality that sustained the work party. I think, not with the middle of my mind, but off at the margins somewhere, that maybe I should be that way. I’ve been losing the textbook debate in the Political Science Division for about ten years now. Maybe I should stop pouting and join in finding a more agreeable solution. That is clearly where the sympathies I gave my grandfather would take me and I believe that the models in our stories affect us just like that.

If our stories offer models, they also offer mirrors. I look at myself in the light of the stories I know. Like a bat, I send little sounds toward the stories and I get back the echoes that tell me where I am and, if I am in luck, whether there is food in the area. I push off of the villains in the stories, assuring myself that I am not like them. I hope I am like the heroes in the stories and listen to the echoes to see whether I am. There is a constant self-assessment imbedded in knowing these stories and it is an assessment not only of “me” but of “us.” If this were all conscious, I might think about my family, “We did pretty well”—remembering both the stories that illustrate the goals some family member has reached and also the failures some family member has had to endure. But it isn’t conscious. It is not only below the radar. It is before the radar.

Third and finally, we need receivers of our actions. Social roles tend to come in pairs (or “dyads,” if you have a social science background) and the simple fact is that if I want to be a beneficiary, you will need to want to be a benefactor, and vice versa. If I broadcast my victimhood, I will attract victimizers. If I love steadfastly through good times and bad, people will have my back through good times and bad. That’s not just mutual obligation or tit for tat. It’s playing out the roles in the stories we all know. I am sure that is true of individuals and I suspect that it is true of groups as well. If I were in a family that had an ancient clan rival, I would know for sure.

I think that is the way stories affect us, particularly if the “us” is a group with a long historical tail. And it’s all the more powerful because it isn’t conscious. We reach out emotionally to the good guys in our stories and lean back away from the bad guys. These are not so much the stories that belong to us as they are the stories by which we belong to each other.

[1] Berger is best known for the book he wrote with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. I stumbled across it at a bookstore at Syracuse in 1967 and have lived in it ever since.
[2] One of the things I noticed, for instance, about my brush with depression in 2006 was the speed with which my loser stories aligned themselves into something that felt like a net when it dropped on me and even more like a net when I tried to get out of it. None of those stories was new, but the speed with which they reassembled themselves in my mind truly astounded me.

[3] Apart, that is from the well-known maxim that if you don’t have size, you will have to depend on outside shooting.
[4] This is 1964 in downtown Dayton, Ohio. The book is, The Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society.