The Necessity For Story — Frederick Zackel

ears ago in an anthropology class I learned the two single aspects that all humans seem to have universally shared. All cultures we know about had some form of universal toilet training (thank God!) All cultures that we know about seemed to have some local variation of the incest taboo. (What_s the most obscene phrase you can yell out a car window? Yes, you are in the right neighborhood.)

I have no proof, nor have I searched any of the textbooks for supporting evidence. But, selfishly, I'll now suggest a third universal:

All human beings tell stories.

We all tell stories because we need them.

Story is as important as food.

Sam Goldwyn was asked why he went to the movies every night. "Why not?" he said. "I've got to do something to take my mind off business."

Our lives are intensified by stories. We become part of a greater imagination. For some there will be great enlightenment or moments of great illumination. Stories give us weapons when we fight with our angels for possessions of our souls.

We need stories to help us frame our daily lives.

Stories are necessary to life. They give us an overview of the situation. The characters ("char-actors") in this story or that story "act out" their feelings in these stress-filled situations. What we get from these stories is a heightened awareness of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going.

While it's a story that's never been written, a suggested title Indiana Jones Sails Up The River Of Death shows how readily we as individuals or we as a culture can automatically visualize a basic story motif. We may each see the particular elements of the story differently, but almost instantaneously we catch its drift.

The hero sails up the river of death to discover what lies within his own heart: i.e., how much moral and physical strength he has.

Indiana Jones sails up the River of Death.

We are following Indiana Jones up the River of Death. We're going to visit with Colonel Kurtz. (You may not want to get off the boat.)

No, I am not mixing up metaphors.

These are the Story.

The Story, like the Hero Joseph Campbell wrote about, has a thousand faces.

Let us make a pilgrimage up the river with Marlow to see Colonel Kurtz.

Storytelling began around a campfire. We don't know when, whether a half-million years ago, when humanity seems to have discovered fire-making, or thirty thousand years ago, when our brains had enlarged enough for developing complex syntax, but we presume it occurred sometime between those times, but closer to the latter.

Storytelling is a communal activity. "Now it's your turn to tell a ghost story," the group says, and so the baton is passed.

Stories are patterns of imagined pictures. The most important stories are those we know by heart. Those are the Very Important Stories. The stories you take for granted. The stories you heard growing up. The stories that if you did read, you read rather than read the stories you were supposed to read. Most were never classroom assignments. But maybe you saw the movie, or maybe you actually read the book. But you already knew the story, mostly.

Gulliver. Dracula. Frankenstein.

We have absorbed them. We have made them part of us and we have become a part of them . . . without noticing the absorption. These innocuous (we think) stories touch our nerve endings. We repeat them in other guises and in other media. They are that important to us.

Robinson Crusoe and Tarzan. Huck Finn and Scarlet O'Hara. Long John Silver and Iago and the Joker and Aladdin. The Little Tramp and Scrooge and Mister Hyde. Dionysus and Marty McFly.

All are fictional characters who are warm and alive ("blood-warm", as Emerson said) and part of our cultural collective unconsciousness, and their authors' relative skills and /or their political stances are all irrelevant and immaterial.

I see little point in delving deeply into some stories. What matters is those stories, Gentle Reader, that you know by heart, the ones that (odds are) you never read because you already knew it by heart.

The characters exist for the readers.

Why did you need them?

Andre Breton wrote in The First Surrealist Manifesto, "Put yourself in as passive, or receptive a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to anything."

Our master narrative is those stories we tell to explain the road we're on.

The Phoenicians of Tyre, facing the onslaught of Alexander the Great and his Macedonian Army, felt they had been betrayed by their patron Apollo. Thereupon, as Plutarch tells us, they nailed the God's feet to his stand and wrapped him in heavy chains, so he couldn_t sneak out on them before the battle.

Can you trust your God?

What's the first thing Yahweh says to Job in Job 38: 1-2? "Who is this that obscures divine plans with words of ignorance?" Yahweh's voice in the Book of Job is perhaps the clearest His voice is in the Bible. He fulminates!

Job grouses about his treatment by Yahweh. His buddy Elihu tells Job, hey, the wicked suffer as much as the innocent. You just think Yahweh is indifferent to you and favors them.

This episode with Job is the last time Yahweh speaks directly to Humanity in the Bible. It is as if, after being called upon to explain Himself, Yahweh then decides to break off direct contact with His Chosen People.

Nature abhors a vacuum. As Yahweh recedes from the center (i.e., us humans here on earth), fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and we see the rise of priests and politicians. Remember Yahweh stops speaking around the time of Job, which is the time of King David's monarchy. After David, the politicians and the priests do all the talking. We hear their Side of the Story.

We the people persist in subverting the authorities. In Islam, prayers are performed in the "salat," which includes the prayer rug, a fixture of Moslem life. The Arabian Nights of Ali Baba, Aladdin, and Sherherazade are a body of Arab literature that have almost always been frowned upon by the Holy Authorities.

You must say your prayers five times daily. The human mind is weak; we daydream. Our thoughts fly out the window.

Imagine yourself somewhere else; take a flying carpet ride to somewhere else; daydream while you should be attentive to your prayers.

Popular fictions put our monsters on trial. "The Hero Kicks Death in the Crotch" is no different than "Indiana Jones Sails Up the River of Death," or whatever the next title is.

Each of us constantly compares and contrasts our personal fictions with the real world (as we perceive it). We do this because the real world never stops pouncing upon us.

Somerset Maugham wrote in The Summing Up, "We are told that the Norwegian public looks upon Ibsen's plays as comedies rich in laughter; the English public has never seen anything to laugh at in those harassing dramas."

I share his astonishment. I Love Lucy meets The Doll House?

Yet Kafka would read his work aloud and laugh himself silly.

Charles Dickens gave public readings. Whenever he read aloud the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, nobody cried harder than he cried. Dickens only wrote one novel Hard Times that doesn't have a happy ending.

Why is this story needed?

Tall tales come easy. The early European explorers carried notaries among their crews to authenticate claims of discoveries. Not everybody believed in sailors_ stories about mermaids or Cities of Gold.

What is truth? Do pictures never lie? Hey, don't tell Hollywood. (We invested thirty million bucks in this turkey! The camera better lie!) Hollywood counts on, depends upon pictures lying.

Kodak actually changed the chemical composition of its photographic film for its Asian consumers' preferences. Asians have a different color skin. Truth is relative.

But why is this story needed?

The Master Story is a system that works. It is a story that a group of people (i.e., a tribe, a clan, a nation, a culture) can live by. It must be functional, or it is rejected. One must always ask, why is this story needed?

In Greek myth Daedalus and his son Icarus was fleeing from Crete and its Labyrinth on wings made by his father from beeswax and feathers. Icarus flew too close to the sun, which melted the wax, and Icarus fell from the sky into the sea and disappeared forever.

Let's not put the sun high in the sky. Let's put it on the horizon, far to the west. Someone had to have been the earliest sailors. Their families watched them raise their sails and glide away from the shores. The sails of those first sailing vessels must have looked like bird's wings. They fill the air. The ships glide off and disappear.

We can catch the notions.

The first ships to sail off could not be saved. They were lost far to the west in the setting sun.

The myth of Icarus is a conservative myth. Do not venture too far from the shore. We don't want to lose you.

Do not take risks.

Dante in Canto XXIX of The Inferno tells the incredible story of the con man Grifolino of Arezzo who promised Albero, the idiot son of the Bishop of Siena, that he could teach the boy to fly like Daedalus for a hefty chunk of money. When Grifolino failed to keep his promise, "that eager dunce" Albero had his father arrest him and burn him at the stake as a necromancer. Actually, Grifolino was burned by the bishop as an alchemist; i.e., a counterfeiter of the local currency. Turning lead into gold was both a criminal act and a sin in the eyes of the authorities.

The counterfeitor is sent to hell for dealing with the Devil.

Isn't that crime prevention?

The Greek word "myth" translates into "story."

"Myth" is not something we know.

"Myth" is something we feel in our hearts.

A mythology that works is true.

An obsolete mythology is labeled a lie.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!

Why is this story needed?

Our Master Story often defines our individual aspirations. In ancient Greece, Penelope was the patient wife of Ulysses, and was held up as the Ideal Wife. A 1950s version might be June Cleaver, the Beaver's mother. A young woman of the times could even "willingly" chose to follow this role model. It would not be surprising if the Ideal is tarnished by the Real. Her aspirations proving to be hollow, the young woman could grow to perceive herself as the victim of her own aspirations. Her granddaughter in 2001 has different aspirations.

We are couriers of our Master Story. Saying "the Fourth of July" or "Thanksgiving Day" triggers an emotional reaction in most American listeners that simply does not exist in most Mexicans or Canadians. (Oops! The Canadians celebrate their Thanksgiving Day, too. About a month earlier. Now that you know that, consider how your preconceptions may have been altered.)

We need to ask ourselves why it is needed that the Father of Our Country George Washington as a child chopped down a cherry tree and did not lie to his father about it.

Not many adult Americans believe the story is true. On the other hand, most adult Americans can probably see why the story is needed. After all, to quote another President of the United States, "It all depends upon what the meaning of the word _is_ is."

The question is, as always, not whether the story is true, but why is it needed. Why is it important for Americans that George Washington, the Father of Our Country, did not lie when his father asked him who chopped down the cherry tree?

Is there any adult American who believes this story is true?

But . . . why is it needed?

George Bush was our first post-modern president. During the 1992 Presidential campaign he blamed the LA riots on LBJ's Sixties policies, which no one believed. No wonder he was floundering. No wonder he lost the election.

Post-modernism pays homage to images.

While running for re-election, President Bush visited a flag-factory, flanked on either side by Arnold Schwarzkopf and General Norman Schwartenegger. (I can never tell the two men apart!)

Colonel Harry G. Summers, Junior, in his book, Our Strategy I, observed that over the years the United States government has given twenty-two separate rationales for its military involvement in Vietnam.

We must never forget there are a minimum of 58,153 names on the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D. C. (Tragically, the number grows; it never diminishes.)

Does anybody know why we were in Kuwait?

Let me quote Professor John H. Kautsky in his "Myth, Self-fulfilling Prophecy, and Symbolic Reassurance in the East-West Conflict," even though he was speaking about American strategic thinking in Vietnam.

Kautsky writes, "The point is that myths, no matter how untrue, do have very real consequences; that prophecies based on initially false perceptions can produce conditions which really exist (and thus fulfill the prophecies); that men react to symbols by real behavior, be it activity or quiescence. (As W. I. Thomas said) 'If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.'"

Our Side of the Story is contingent upon 2 + 2 = 4. We are slaves to empirical science. Yet, one-fourth of all the books sold in the decade of the 1980s were written by . . . Stephen King. Now, I may not believe in ghosts. But I believe in ghost stories.

How do we explain the Unexplained?

We tell stories.

Closure makes stories different from real life.

The confrontations are rarely so "real" in real life. I mean, we "feel" confrontations in stories. In real life "we all get along just fine" and mutter under our breath and very rarely (for all the newspaper headlines) do we "take matters into our own hands" and escalate a situation into a matter of life and death.

The emotions in stories are real, just not "so much" or "so often" as in real life. Real life is not often that emotional, not that melodramatic. "Real life" is not as emotionally intense as "reel life". We learn at an early age (the clich� says) to hide our emotions from the crowd. Almost all of us wear social "masks" in public. Rarely do we come across someone who wears his heart on his sleeves . . . and when we do, we make mention of it.

In stories, however, all reactions are exaggerated, heavy-handed, overblown and thus visibly evident . . . so that the audience can see them. (In narratives the reader is "told" what the important reactions are. In drama, where "showing" is more important than "telling", the same rules still apply, albeit on a different level. In the theater actors are taught "to act" so that the back of the theater catches the emotional meaning. In the movies, where close-ups rule, the stage actors must be re-taught "to react" for the camera lens to catch it.)

Unlike in stories, our daily lives rarely have such obvious turning points. Oh, these turning points do exist; we each have them in our lives, those crossroads where our lives move into new and different pathways, but life itself is not so precisely defined as in stories.

Also, in stories dramatic conflicts usually escalate into great crescendos of conclusions, followed by waterfalls of purged emotions.

In real life, most critically, we don't even get to see our own closure. We're dead. Because we_re dead, we miss the moral of the story.

After all, how are we going to die AND THEN once the curtain is down, walk out of the theater of our lives, and reflect on what happened to the hero (us) and the meaning of our life, and then say to our friends, "What did you think about that ending? Me, I thought it was -- "

Unfortunately we die, and that ends our interest in tonight's story.

The trouble with real life is that it goes on without us AND without remembering us.

I know, as individuals, we are haunted by what we repress. If we repress them too forcibly, they boomerang back in our faces. I suspect the same exists for the Master Narrative.

Stories are how we order the universe to make it not only intelligible to us but also suggests how we can best approach it and keep sane. Stories are how we place a pattern over a Chaos we cannot comprehend.

We seek to order our sensory input. Memory and perception help shape these. Not just dreams, but also false memories and paranormal experiences may simply be the subconscious_ attempts to explain the inexplicable in fictional scenarios, according to values and priorities that are contemporary.

The Greek god Pan represents the uncontrolled male libido. Pan kept his horns and his hooves and became Satan to the Church.

Two millennia later Satan can become E.T. Our focus has changed. We have aliens, not magic. The magic ring is actually an ET decoder. Ye Olde Magick Shoppe is now Ye Nu Alien Shoppe. A curio shop on a faraway planet, a junk store.

Greek mythology, Christian theology, or Spielbergian narratology. These seemingly innocuous stories touch our nerve endings. We repeat them in other guises and in other media. They are that important to us.

Story is as important as food.

Legend says Mata Hari blew a kiss to the firing squad that killed her. It's a great story. What need does it fill?

Fictional characters become more than real; they become a frame of reference. We call some people a Pollyanna, a Grinch, a Scrooge, an Ugly Duckling, a Chicken Little, a Frankenstein.

A story is an artifact, a technological construct, a shell, a machine, a vehicle for an image or a meaning that's somewhere inside.

Most stories are written in a realistic mode. They need some sort of superficial daylight logic, as Damon Knight writes in Creating Short Fiction, "to get past the censor of the reader's conscious mind."

The writer works deliberately and consciously.

Knight writes, "There is no such thing as a story. The words typed on paper are only instructions used by each reader to create a story. The story exists in the reader's mind and nowhere else."

The writer writes deliberately and consciously. There are no loose ends. Or are there?

Hear Gilbert Highet in his wonderful book The Classical Traditions: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature: "The finest creative artists are those who live most fully both within their own nation and time, and within the much larger cultural stream of civilization, to which even the most powerful state is only a small channel, a single tributary."

Humanity had a half-million years of hunting and gathering. That's a self-enduring culture.

The hunt was all. We see that in the caves of Altamira and Lascaux. There actually were monsters to kill. If you don't kill them, you don't eat. And humanity is endowed with those canine teeth.

Male dominance had its start here. Only a able-bodied man could demand the courage and the endurance. One needed skill in the weaponry. Think of the excitement of the chase. Think of the satisfaction that comes with success.

Yet it is curious, though, how humanity identifies more with the quarry than with the hunter. Perhaps we were chased by too many predators not to latch on to empathy.

The early hunting societies had taboos. They were necessary for its survival. These taboos were a focus of magic and ritual.

We need game. A good supply of it. We need to exert our power over it. And we need to appease the spirit of the slain animal or the god who presides over it.

So, men disguised themselves as animals. Decoys to deceive their prey. The hunter's life depended upon the death of his quarry. That death was deemed sacrificial. The hunter recognizes and accepts his own mortality. After all, death is the most successful predator. The ultimate predator.

Man and beast suffer the same fate.

Check out the cave paintings.

Michelangelo felt sculptors and stonemasons were alike in that the form was in the stone itself and for both their job was to find that form and bring it out. That an idea would come to both sculptor and mason that would fit the shape of the stone. His eighteen-foot statue of David was formed from a block of marble rejected by every other sculptor during the previous century.

Michelangelo "saw" David inside the old marble block.

In our best stories we find strong characters in a desperate situation that rings true and comes alive. (To tighten that sentence, Shakespeare wrote about fascinating characters in intriguing situations. In addition, desperate people make the best stories, so the best stories are always a matter of life and death.)

Man is a tool-making animal.

So novels and movies are what kind of tool?

If we look back at the cave art of the Neolithic, we see elements of nature, features of the hunt, and various stick figures who seem to be magicians with great powers. We find many "Venus" statues, which seem to portray the woman's body as a source of power.

We find . . . hand prints.

There are forty thousand-year-old hand prints in Kakadu National Park in Australia. There are twenty thousand-year-old hand prints in the caves of Chauvet, France. There are hand prints in Allen's Cave in Australia that are of both ancient and recent origin.

See the Kalahari rock art figures in Botswana. The hand prints in the Carnarvon National Park in Queensland. The hand prints of the Anasazi are there in Green Mark Springs in Utah. These are not graffiti. These are not desecrate or vandalization. We may not know their precise functions, but we can see they are an integral part of the entire "artistic project".

Hand prints were made by spitting paint at a hand pressed against the wall. Spitting in a sacred cave?

Cave art was meant for the gods to peruse in the dark. Humans see it -- gasp!

Art is a shock of recognition that overwhelms us, overtakes us, transposes itself onto us, and we forget ourselves and our lives even if it's just for an instant.

Art strikes a responsive chord inside us, and for a moment we disappear and it takes our place.

Egyptians painted the inside of the tombs and the insides of the coffins. They were stories, liturgies, literature. Great deeds being done. Magical words. Magical symbols. Author's names.

The pictographs of the Pecos Valley tell stories in over 250 sites in within an area of two hundred square miles. The story there of the White Shaman is over twelve thousand years old.

The Venus of Willendorf is a similar talisman.

The human female nude as a collective self-portrait over the past forty thousand years remains an image of enigmatic power and portent.

The same old values in new clothes. We don't see the common body underneath.

The human nude is over forty thousand years old.

The Venus of Willendorf was a household shrine -- like the ancient Roman Lares Familiares -- to protect this home, to guarantee fecundity, to protect this home.

Authorial self-consciousness began in the Ice Age caves: The hand print on the wall. Most experts assume that this was just another talismanic sign, a way of warding off the evil eye, or its Ice Age equivalent. But they deny the power of the hand in this scenario.

We shake hands to announce we come into this deal as mutuals. We raise our palm to signify we carry no weapons. Our criminals (and others) surrender by holding hands up.

In his novel Mountolive, Lawrence Durrell writes, "It was only the spark of a match. But in the soft yellow flap he saw that he was standing in a gaunt high chamber with shattered and defaced walls covered in graffiti and the imprint of dark palms -- signs which guard the superstitious against the evil eye."

By my authority, I declare the evil eye be gone!

In the Ice Age caves the hand print is a sign of author-ship.

"I am the author of these works."

These are our human soul's earliest "inmost caves". Art that was not meant for public viewing, for public consumption. This is art as a gasp! the viewer makes when the torch is lit and these paintings are lit up.

Much has been mentioned about some obvious purposes for these paintings. Male bonding, mentoring, initiating, generally.

The awe of art is not spoken of often enough.

Part of the cave paintings include the hand print.

It is the hand print of author-ship.

ME! it says. I am one of the sacred. By my actions here, I belong here.

Art and creation.

The author is the creator here.

Like Clarissa Pinkola Estes, I too see myself as one of them.

Estes writes in her work Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, "Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags, and crazy people."

According to Bernard DeVoto in The World of Fiction, a novel is "a story of imaginary events occurring to imaginary people" plus "a reader who follows it with recognition and surprise." DeVoto adds, "By the magic of fiction, (the reader) may find meaning in life."

Drawing attention to an interesting shape in the sky is not challenging its "meaning." Various shapes can be perceived in the clouds.

Yes, I am defensive. To many peoples, the shape of clouds in the skies has specific meanings. These shapes are taken very seriously. They are taken for granted. They are often unquestioned. They are more than assumptions.

Our stories -- our selected fictions -- are too important, too vital and necessary, for they are the basic foundations of our values and priorities.

They hold back Chaos and the Night.

Humanity takes pleasure from its skills. "To do something big" seems to be our calling card. Look at the loving care that placed in those earliest art works. Think of the effrontery each piece implies, for "to create something from nothing" is a power given to the gods.

All of humanity's monuments commemorate their builders.

And we all learn to appreciate the "feel" of an artist. What is right in this work of art. What rings true in this work.

The human hand is all over those ancient caves. Think of the effrontery of the artist. His hand print in a sacred cave?

Cave art represents the life and death struggle.

The duty of art is to hold back death, to counter our own individual mortality, to convey humanity's greater immortality, and to say "I belong to this community".

Let us embrace those stories that nurture and protect us. The ones most needed must be reaffirmed. But they must also be the ones we freely choose.

The T'ang painter Wu Tao-tzu painted a landscape on a wall that was so lifelike, he walked into it and vanished, leaving the mural behind.

Before I do the same thing, let me quote James Baldwin in "Sonny_s Blues":

"Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything new. He and the boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."

Frederick Zackel is a contributing editor to the literary website January magazine He has published two novels and teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He can be reached at fzackel@wcnet.org