Do We Need Stories?

That's the question recently posed by Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books.

From the article...

Let’s tackle one of the literary set’s favorite orthodoxies head on: that the world “needs stories.” There is an enormous need,” Jonathan Franzen declares in an interview with Corriere della Sera (there’s no escape these days), “for long, elaborate, complex stories, such as can only be written by an author concentrating alone, free from the deafening chatter of Twitter.”

Of course as a novelist it is convenient to think that by the nature of the job one is on the side of the good, supplying an urgent and general need. I can also imagine readers drawing comfort from the idea that their fiction habit is essential sustenance and not a luxury. But what is the nature of this need? What would happen if it wasn’t met? We might also ask: why does Franzen refer to complex stories? And why is it important not to be interrupted by Twitter and Facebook? Are such interruptions any worse than an old land line phone call, or simply friends and family buzzing around your writing table? Jane Austen, we recall, loved to write in domestic spaces where she was open to constant interruption.

Proponents of “the world needs stories” thesis are legion, but one of the more elaborate statements comes in Salman Rushdie’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). Here, in a text that falls between fable and magical realism, the telling of many stories is aligned with the idea of a natural ecology; in the normal and healthy way of things, we’re told, all the different stories of the world flow together in a great ocean of narrative. But now this harmony is threatened by an evil “cultmaster” who seeks to poison and eventually shut off the flow of stories, imposing universal silence and sterility as part of a bid for omnipotence.