Today, and continuing throughout November, I am presenting a series of posts I’m calling The Happiness Plot, which will make up a very brief introduction to storytelling structure. A perfect way to stay in the groove for NaNoWriMo2014.
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Ready to uncover the plot?
To find the beginning of The Happiness Plot, click here or “The Happiness Plot” category listing to the right.
Now, we continue with The Happiness Plot…
Story as the Creative Demonstration of Truth
14.
I’ve been talking about stories as “promoting” either “thick” or “thin” conceptions of justice or love or whatever. This is an assumption well worth challenging. Do stories tell us truths about life? Is there any relation between stories and philosophy?
C.S. Lewis, in An Experiment in Criticism, appears to say “no.” In speaking about the differences between tragedy, comedy, and farce he writes: “None of the three kinds [of drama] is making a statement about life in general. They are all constructions: things made out of the stuff of real life; additions to life rather than comments on it.”
Lewis qualifies his point. Any story “will be impregnated with all the wisdom, knowledge, and experience the author has; and even more by something which I can only vaguely describe as the flavor or “feel” that actual life has for him.” However, to regard the story “as primarily a vehicle for that philosophy” is for Lewis an “outrage” to the thing the author has made for us.
What Lewis is keen on stressing here, rightly, is that stories, novels, plays–narrative art in general–should not be taken as mere vehicles for the dissemination of an author’s philosophy. A play, for example, is not just a delivery system for abstract comments about life—more diverting than reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, to be sure, but essentially no different from Kant in being a philosophical proclamation. No story can simply be reduced to a statement of whatever wisdom the author may possess. “Don’t be indecisive” (I jest) is not a substitute for Hamlet.
A play, in other words, is not a philosophical statement plus some literary qualities that we may dispense with if we choose.
And yet, Lewis fails to do justice to the way in which stories do tell us truths. Robert McKee, in his wonderful book Story, formulates this idea quite nicely: “Storytelling is the creative demonstration of truth. A story is the living proof of an idea, the conversion of idea to action.”
A story is not a work of philosophy, but there is at least a perceived wisdom embodied in the decisions the author has his characters make. The “argument” of the story is its plot, which in its climax aspires to conclude something about the way life ought to be lived. But this truth, if it is one, will only be convincing to an audience who attends to the literary qualities of the piece.
* The image above is reproduced courtesy of James MacMillan at Wikimedia Commons under the following license.
So a story is not a mere vehicle for a philosophy, but a philosophy is embedded in every story like the seal of a signet ring is embedded in wax.
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