Against story

Maybe neat narratives are what we want but not what we need

Image generated by me on Midjourney.

Welcome new subscribers! Each one of you deserves fast-track canonisation. My last three posts were all about AI (why I changed my mind about AI; why history is no guide to AI; a better way to think about what an AGI “wants” or is driven to do). This week, an interlude on another topic, one that, frankly, I know more about. Next week I’ll return to AI with the question: should engineers quit their jobs if they believe AI is dangerous?

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This is an age of narrative, apparently. Even I’ve perpetuated this narrative narrative. I’ve been a narrative consultant, a narratologist, I have my own theory of narrative, and I think I know something about what makes for an effective narrative in TV, literature, PR, and politics. 

Yet I personally am a little cold on story. My favourite reading and viewing has been mostly non-narrative works (especially lyric poetry), or those works where the story is less important than something else like tone, technique, or theme. 

It’s not just endless iterations of the hero’s goddammed journey that I find vapid. All plot-driven genres bore me. They’re the recipe approach to art. Get all the right ingredients, follow the algorithm, and dish up pabulum that goes down easy. 

Think about a well written detective story. You start with a corpse, pepper some clues through the first two acts, not too prominently, with one or two red herrings thrown in. If done well, when the killer is revealed, it should have been hard to predict but inevitable in hindsight. When the detective story was invented, just 130 years ago, these ingredients weren’t all known. The first detective stories didn’t even have clues, so the reader wasn’t enlisted as a detective themselves. One guy put together the modern recipe for a detective story before the others and that’s why Conan Doyle is the only name anyone remembers of those pioneers. (This is Franco Moretti’s classic article tracing the evolution of the detective story. Moretti’s cancelled btw.)

The question is, would you read the same detective story twice? Everything is crafted to engage the reader until the revelation of whodunnit. Interest then evaporates. Reading for plot means reading everything only once. 

But works whose primary feature is, say, the characters, are more re-readable and re-watchable. For this reason, sitcoms — which are about character, not plot — are constantly on repeat and the streamers' best intellectual properties are still standbys like Seinfeld and Friends.

The most enduring, revisitable stories seem to be those which take you into a world you want to return to. It’s harder to identify exactly what happens here because each rewatchable or rereadable world is unique. We say we love the mood, the tone, the vibe. Casablanca. Wuthering Heights. Twin Peaks. These stories don’t wither once you learn how they end. You want to return to those worlds, those moods. 

The commercial dominance of plot irks me. It’s so Darwinian. We’re predisposed to want to see goodies struggle but ultimately win, the baddies get comeuppance, and then have it all wrap up at the end, with no extraneous scenes in there, with the story entirely driven by people’s actions rather than deus ex machina. Aristotle clocked all this shit in 400BC and every screenwriting guide recapitulates the same advice. Some modern writers propose theories from evolutionary psychology to explain our thirst for certain shaped plots.¹ We should be ashamed at how easily these buttons are pushed by every soap opera, romance novel, and Marvel film. 

I want more. It’s not only that more original works press our buttons by accessing our narrative receptors via new pathways, by avoiding the most hackneyed formulae that we see in superhero films — some works also press new buttons. 

Modernist novels, for example, often eschew standard plots or the notion of plot altogether. I’m extremely comfortable asserting that these are superior achievements to the Marvel films. (Easy target. Should I lay off them? They enrich people’s time… maybe).

Modernist novels are an acquired taste. But isn’t that good? What’s so great about repeatedly consuming myths and narratives that make all the right noises to get certain hormones secreted from our all too hackable glands? When a story is described as “timeless”, maybe we should think that’s lame, the story equivalent of sugar. Or opium. 

This is really about life

If something feels good, it’s probably because it’s pressing the buttons that were wired up 100,000 years ago at the latest. In other words, we found some modern stimulus that somehow resembles or performs the role of something we should have been doing in the Pleistocene. Like eating honey, having sex, or recognising status.

Aim higher! We can not only push these buttons in new ways but create new buttons. Or, better yet, do things for reasons other than that they push our buttons. 

Even the most sophisticated attempts to restore a life of meaning, to find purpose, to help the self, are in thrall to the operating manual of our nervous system. If we can sleep enough, eat well, exercise, feel embedded in a community, raise children, and align our daily goals with our larger mission we will actually feel good. 

And it’s true, all that advice works because it has all the ingredients for the recipe. 

I’m surprised, or at least disappointed, that even the most sophisticated versions of self-help, backed by serious cognitive science and non-dogmatic spirituality, fall into step behind the nervous system: life comes down to feeling good. They’re too savvy to advocate momentary pleasure. Instead, they offer dampened but repeatable hits to our reward system. The pleasure of gradual improvement. The pleasure of a daily routine. The pleasure of relevance realisation. The pleasure of a growth mindset. The pleasure of gradually bringing into harmony one’s inner and outer lives, one’s short- and long-term goals. The pleasure of the tao. The pleasure of the jhānas. 

But what if we decide, for new and novel reasons, that life can be spent in activities that don’t even necessarily make us feel good?² These actions might be ones to which our endocrine systems are blind and deaf. They could be actions that have little emotional and intuitive appeal but which we decide are important for, oh I don’t know, the ongoing survival of humanity and the planet — or for some totally new rationale.

It’s not one or the other. But if we pursue only that which fosters bodily homeostasis and mental balance, we’ll never get around to the spontaneous, exploratory, experimental. These things are needed in an ever-changing world. Any story that uses its form not to reiterate and comfort, but to challenge and extend, is therefore an allegory of progress and a muse of invention.

1. There are heaps of good books about story. John Yorke’s Into the Woods and Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling explain some of the evolutionary roots of our love of certain narrative structure and plots, and why a satisfying story satisfies. They detail exactly what I’m criticising above: stories that make us press the lever again and again like that fabled lab rat that kept choosing dopamine over food and starved to death. It’s still very much worth understanding conventional stories and these books are well written. There’s also The Bestseller Code, which isn’t evolutionary but uses machine learning techniques to identify features of commercially successful novels and make some points that are more interesting than you might guess. The more academic end comes from a loose movement called literary Darwinism. The big names are Jonathan Gottschall and Joseph Carroll. As you might imagine, their carcasses have been picked clean by the literary establishment. Charges of reductionism, scientism, philistinism, etc. For mine, the pick of literary Darwinism is Brian Boyd’s On The Origin of Stories. It’s a good primer on evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology in general. The most thought-engendering is William Flesch’s Comeuppance. For those interested in literary theory Boyd and Flesch are impressive studies and definitely worth reading. But I’m a little cool on this movement overall, not for anti-science reasons or anything that spicy. It’s for aesthetic reasons. I just don’t think there’s a Darwinian explanation of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, or Elaine de Koonig’s art, or bebop jazz. And this means that as “high” art strays further from the default, button-pushing, programmatic stuff that thrilled or soothed our ancestors, it’s less amenable to evolutionary analysis. Is this elitist? Yes. In a life with shockingly limited free time, I want to spend it on the best, not the mid.

2. I’m not claiming this is a new idea. Cf. various cults, artistic movements, radical political groups, and iconoclasts. But even most groups that are meant to go beyond parochial needs just backslide into feeling good. E.g. transhumanists who want to convert the mass of the solar system into hedonium. Or the enlightenment crowd who want bliss via consciousness because that’s the only intrinsically “valenced” (valued as positive or negative) thing in the universe. Meh.