Finding new kinds of stories

Changing narrative content is not enough - we need completely new narrative shapes and forms

A few weeks ago in a blog post on the IRIS website I talked about the issue of narrative collapse – the idea, posited by Douglas Rushkoff, that we are in a crisis of narrative - not (just) a contestation between different stories but a contestation and crisis over narrative itself. A loss of linear stories that explain our reality. This is a large part of why there no longer seems to be a narrative truth, a  making-sense-of-things, that we all accept, and see as reasonable and common sense. Common sense — common sense-making — no longer exists. (For reference, see the widely diverging accounts of January 6th, or the conspiracy theories over Taylor Swift’s romance, or Kate Middleton’s photograph.) 

In that post I wrote: 

“Maybe the problem is that the dominant narrative model in popular culture — linear stories with heroes who go on journeys — is no longer fit for purpose. Maybe the problem is that dominant meta-narratives, which we usually hold in common as cultures or as nations, and which we usually use as an (unconscious) measure against which to judge more fleeting narratives and stories, have come unmoored. Our dominant economic and political models are in crisis, because their internal contradictions can no longer be contained — so it should not be surprising that the narratives that served to justify these models are in crisis too. For too long we have worked to stuff reality into familiar narrative packages, but now reality is bursting out at the seams.” 

I really want to delve deeper into these ideas. Those of us who work in the fields of narrative change and impactful storytelling tend to focus a lot on narrative content: we get caught up with the idea that if we just tell better stories, we can change things. And by better stories, we mean stories that feature our favorite issues in a particular light, or that switch around the types of people who feature as heroes, villains or victims, and so on. 

But narrative collapse is showing us that it’s not just about the content or characters of the stories we tell. The problem is deeper than that. The narrative forms that have predominated, certainly in Western culture, are no longer capable of helping us adequately grapple with and understand reality (if they ever were). At a very simple level, our most popular stories are individualistic. They focus on the actions of a hero or a small group of heroes, as they confront a series of challenges in search of their goal. It is their individual qualities, and their individual decisions, that determine their success or failure. 

This form is not used only in popular entertainment, but in news, documentaries — almost everywhere. For example, think of the short packaged background bios that get played on US TV during sports events such as the Olympics, each telling the story of the athlete who struggled bravely against huge odds to achieve victory. 

Pull the focus back a bit from each individual story and you can see the pervasiveness of this story form exerts a huge influence on how we as a society understand politics, economics, society, and our own lives: for example, that the course of our lives depends overwhelmingly on our personal qualities and our decisions as individuals; that there are heroes, villains and victims; that we need individual leaders and heroes to save us — and that when the ‘right one’ comes along we should follow them. 

Stories help us understand the world, but stories, like any other representation of reality, are not reality. Storytellers — like journalists, documentarians and historians — of necessity have to leave a lot of reality out, have to distort the truth to some degree in order to make the story fit the pattern, to meet the audiences’ expectations of what a story should be. To have it ring true. 

What gets left out in the narrative forms we are most used to? So much. Systemic and social context, history, privilege, messiness, inconvenient, disregarded and countervailing voices, confusion, coincidence, chance, randomness, injustice… The list goes on.  

I think we’re at the point where the balance between truth and narrative distortion is way out of whack, and so it’s almost as if, no matter what story gets told, no matter who the heroes, villains and victims are said to be, the story no longer rings true. Too much has been left out. The distortion of reality in order for the story to fit our cultural narrative expectations is too great. So we distrust, we no longer suspend our disbelief, we look for hidden motives and conjure up conspiracy theories. 

That this narrative crisis is happening along with a crisis in democracy is no coincidence. The narrative forms we are used to have played a key role in bolstering and justifying our current political and economic system. Just as the messiness of reality can no longer be shut out of our dominant narrative formats and is bursting out all over the place, so the injustices, abuses and harms we have justified or hidden away in order to perpetuate our current economic and political systems can no longer be justified or hidden away. The damage is too great, and everyone knows it at some level. 

I think there are three possible responses to all this, both at a narrative and a social and political level. The first is repression: to deny the injustices and harms, deny that our dominant narratives have distorted too much for too long — and try ever harder to push everything and everyone back into traditional forms and formats. The second is reform: we recognize there is a problem but we think we can resolve it with a few tweaks at the margins, refusing to face the fact that our narrative forms and our current systems are collapsing around us. The third is revolution: to recognize and accept the crisis, to begin to explore radical alternatives, new narrative forms and formats, and completely new social systems — because at this point, nothing else will do.

If we do this, I’m starting to think we have to find a new way of finding new shapes of stories and systems. Instead of imposing our explanatory and organizational shapes onto the world, we may have to listen and wait for new ones to reveal themselves to us. 

I’ve recently been challenged and inspired by reading Hospicing Modernity, by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. In it she talks about a new way of thinking about stories, in contrast to how we have been socialized, which is to “to treat stories as tools of communication that enable us to describe reality, prescribe the future, and accumulate knowledge.” 

Instead, we might see stories as:

 “living entities that emerge from and move things in the world. Some of these stories are meant to exist for a long time, others expire early. Some stories are meant to remain as and where they are and to work only with a very select group of people; other stories are meant to travel the world, and to transform and to be transformed by other world-entities … Sometimes [these stories] will hide somewhere in your body, perhaps close to a song that already lives there, and wait for the right time to dance with you.”