Introducing Storylife

Storylife comes out officially today January 14th. Here is its amazon page. Here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page. Here’s a link to me talking about the book with Dr. G. and Dr. Rad of the Partial Historians.

Like many others, I spent the first year of the COVID pandemic in an fugue state, trying to maintain some semblance of the life that preceded March 2020 (work, family, relationships) while also living as a relentless voyeur of the things going on in the world: the early news reports of the virus, our rapid and misunderstood shutdowns, the #BlackLivesMatter protests in the wake of endless police violence and judicial exoneration, the spectacle of a president both incompetent and insufficiently concerned, and the added drama of a political campaign that was always going to be important, but whose urgency seemed newly inescapable.

At the time, I was preparing for the release of a book I had spent the better part of a decade researching and writing on psychology and the Homeric Odyssey. Much of the theoretical groundwork for this book rested upon cognitive approaches to narrative, perhaps best typified by the work of Jerome Bruner, Mark Turner, and the psychologist Michael White. The paralysis I felt made me think more about the trauma-studies side of my work, how narrative can be used to address traumatic experiences (but also how narrative can produce trauma on its own).

Observing the world as it changed from the vantage of social media while writing to promote The Many-Minded Man, led me to ask a basic question that has no clear answer: does knowing you’re being traumatized provide any benefit against the long-term impact of trauma? This may seem a histrionic question in isolation, but my thoughts were ranging to the cultural level: communities can suffer trauma together and it can fundamentally shift their identities, their relationships to power and language, and their ability to respond to future challenges.

I don’t believe I have sufficiently answered that that question for myself, partly because I went in a different direction. I found myself overwhelmed by the shifts that the stories we were hearing and telling about the world were taking and how they impacted our actions: from our public health response to COVID (which included a broad range of denial, quack-science, and conspiracy theories) and our shifting communal responses to state-sanctioned violence against black people, our real world responses with life-and-death consequences were (and are) informed by ways of viewing the world that can simply be framed as stories (to avoid, for a moment, the issue of fact and fiction).

For years in teaching myth, I had already used DNA as a metaphor for trying to get students to think about how the same kinds of stories were continually reused. My primary emphasis in teaching myth has long been to downplay any notion of which version of a story is ‘correct’ or ‘first’ and instead to encourage students to think about why some details may have been important in one context and not another. Why, for example, is the story of Oedipus in the Odyssey is rather different from the one canonized by Sophocles while still being recognizable the ‘same’? The answer I often have given only partly as an evasion comes from the Muses themselves, when they tell Hesiod at the beginning of the Theogony that “we know how to tell lies that sound like the truth but we can speak the truth when we want to”: fact and fiction are not meaningful categories of narrative. What matters it what a particular narrative says and what it does in the world.

So, for a long time, I had approached the category of myth—a field long dominated by patterns and repetitions—by asking students to entertain the idea that story patterns contain potential meanings like genes in strands of DNA that adapt to the needs of their audiences. Witnessing the impact of counter-narratives during COVID while also working on multiple tasks-forces at my institution where we learned about COVID mutation, transmission, and mitigation, I came to see our communication about the virus as a kind of narrative that was also changing through transmission and having an equal—if not greater—impact on the world. I was already primed to see story in everything, but the ‘new’ thing I saw was that narrative’s negative potential was as great as its redemptive power. This was not really a novel idea for me—I include chapters on the negative impact of Odysseus’ narrative power on marginalized people in the Odyssey in The Many-Minded Man. But I think even this was too limited.

COVID did not, has not ended. And the stories that were shaping our world in 2020 have certainly not abated. I started talking about some of the ideas that eventually showed up in Storylife with Heather Gold in Fall of 2021. We were discussing various possible books and I had offered up some pretty stale proposals when she asked me just to tell her what I had been thinking about. I started to tell her an idea about comparing the structure of Homeric poetry and mythical narrative to DNA and using biological analogies to decenter authorship and design to show how complex narratives can develop from basic structures. I told her that story functions like a virus and is always changing and has no agent driving it and added some examples I had written about before (especially the tale of Kleomedes the Astupalaian). And she, miraculously, asked me how long it would take me to write a proposal and sample chapter.

Storylife certainly would not have been written without the COVID pandemic; It might not have happened at all if I hadn’t gotten COVID too. My family avoided getting sick until the Omicron phase of COVID. We stayed pretty isolated for 2020 and 2021 once we found out my wife was pregnant with our third child. We kept our kids home from school when their classmates returned, saw very few people, and tried to avoid any exposure. I was the first to show symptoms and was sick the longest, needing the 10 days home to be able to leave the house and showing symptoms for months after (it was over three months until I stopped feeling the impact of aphasia daily; I went from running under an 8-minute mile with ease for over an hour to struggle to finish one under 10).

I wrote the sample chapter (most of what is now chapter 5) while recovering from a fever and convalescing at Homer. To be honest, I remember the story of writing the chapter that I told after far more than the actual writing itself. (But this doesn’t concern me overmuch: in retrospect, my recall of writing anything seems to be pretty limited. My unconfirmed theory is that the focused activity of writing itself may limit how memories of around it form.) I’ve joked before that the novel coronavirus should be credited as a co-author, but I definitely wrote other chapters in various degrees of health. Once the manuscript was accepted, I wrote in hour or two blocks carved out of the day—producing quickly, but still delivering the manuscript a half-year late.

I started Storylife as a provocation to address both our blinkered view of poetic creation and our willful denial of the impact that narratives have on our lives together. Nothing I have seen since I finished Storylife has changed my essential convictions. The most recent presidential election, our inaction on climate change, the assault on higher education, our inability to acknowledge the truth of the horrors unfolding around the world to support our interests—everything we do together is framed and mediated by narrative. Narrative is steroidal in the information age. It moves faster than we can handle, and twists the way we understand. But it also allows us to see a different world, to imagine something better. Story retains the potential to help us realize a far kinder world with grander expectations for lives of meaning and comfort for every human being. But we need to be the kinds of audiences who want to hear this tale.

 

Post-script: Communities write books

One of the central theses of the book is that we as human beings are cognitively disinclined to think in the aggregate and to see ourselves as part of collective endeavors rather than individuals sealed off to the world physically and psycho-emotionally. (This is cognitive and cultural too.) The ideas in this book were shaped by countless conversations, presentations, questions, objections, editing, and more. At some level, I can’t take credit for something so many others were involved in. Here are the other creators I can remember.

From the acknowledgements: –

Particular parts of the book were improved in talks given at the Greek Literature and the Environment Workshop, UCSB, the University of Chicago Rhetoric and Poetics, Homer Lecture, and work presented at the Brandeis Psychology department colloquia series… Some of the ideas and passages also appeared in pieces for The Conversation or Neos Kosmos.

I owe a debt to many for help with bibliography and subjects beyond my expertise, including Joseph Cunningham, Sophus Helle, Prasad Jallepalli, Dan Perlman Seth Sanders, Claudio Sansone and Mario Telo. I cannot thank Eric Blum, Becca Frankel, and Talia Franks enough for editing and bibliographical assistance. Among the many friends who have supported my flights of fancy over the years, I would be remiss not to thank Lenny Muellner, Mimi Kramer, Justin Arft, Elton Barker, Celsiana Warwick, Julio Vega-Payne, Anna Hetherington, Paul O’Mahony, Sarah Bond, and Larry Benn, all of whom read drafts of or discussed various parts of this book and provided needed encouragement. Special thanks are due to my editor Heather Gold who provided the focus and the framework to help turn a half-baked idea into a full manuscript. Elizabeth Sylvia also provided invaluable editorial support,, and Susan Laity’s careful eye improved the book’s prose and style immeasurably.

And, as always, my spouse, Shahnaaz, deserves the final word—my belief in the future and any confidence I have starts with her.