The general idea that human beings are “storytelling” animals is now widely pervasive, particularly following the popularity of books by Yuval Noah Harari. I made a similar connection when I noted that religion and literature began as twins: whatever may be the nature or existence of divinity, rituals etc. in different religions (and these vary widely), there is no doubt that all of them are accessed by us (and the devout) through stories. But I do not want to stop at this level: stories might be common to all of human consciousness, but they operate in distinctive ways in literature.
One way to approach this would be to address the trajectory of stories in anthropology and in literature, a difference that is pertinent to what I call the agnostic reading of literature. This difference has to be illustrated because literature does not simply work by providing “thick description”, as contemporary anthropological writing often provides even thicker description, without having the effect of literature, except in cases, such as Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, where the anthropologist clearly and decisively embraces the techniques and ethos of literature.
For instance, in The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing stresses the “scientific” value of stories: “To listen to and tell a rush of stories is a method.” In her illuminating book, she offers a number of such stories, often those of immigrants and war veterans gathering matsutake, the most valuable mushroom in the world, in different countries. She knits them together to suggest, as the subtitle of her book puts it, “the possibility of life in capitalist ruins”, which also includes an alternative critique of capitalism.
Tsing is writing long after what can be called “postcolonial” anthropology has come to be established and accepted in her discipline. This is anthropology that listens to the stories of others. It grew as a critique of the dominant colonial tradition of anthropological writing, which was just as dependent on stories, but mostly those of the colonial or European “self”. A quintessential example of this colonial tradition is offered in the writings of Henry Morton Stanley – of “Dr Livingstone, I presume” fame – and Sven Lindqvist, the Swedish writer and historian, has succinctly excavated Stanley’s narratives to reveal the remains of all the other stories that they hide, evade, obscure, even erase. The necessary criticism of the colonial monopoly of the European self telling stories about others has led to the practice of anthropologists listening to the stories that others have to tell. Its development can also be traced in related fields, such as Subaltern studies. The best anthropologists today, such as Tsing, can raise this to the level of theory and method.
And yet, from the perspective of literature, they are faced with the same problem that eventually made us question the stories of people like Stanley: no story or narrative can be accepted on face value. Even a single word cannot be taken for granted across two people, as Chekhov knew. Just as there is no guarantee that Stanley is telling the truth, there is no guarantee of truth in the words of a Vietnamese immigrant or a US war veteran. The matter is more complex in at least two different but at times overlapping ways: (a) there is no guarantee that the truth of the narrator is the truth as it was out there, while there is often also no way of ascertaining the truth out there; and (b) there is no guarantee that the language of the narrator is the same as the language of the reader, even when they share the same language.
Literature cannot be conflated with “storytelling”. Storytelling is related to the definition of language. While I agree with Harari that Homo Sapiens is (primarily) a storytelling animal that thinks in stories rather than numbers or graphs, I particularly stress this to be understood as based on a prior argument for the distinctiveness of human language, defined as an abstract system of differential signs. True, scholars have convincingly argued that other animals and birds interpret their surroundings and create their own “experiential worlds”, as Amitav Ghosh puts it. He notes, “Any pet owner knows that a dog understands as meaningful the relationship between the home, the park, and certain times of day. For the dog, is this a ‘chronology’ or a ‘narrative’?” Thinking of this as a kind of storytelling, Ghosh quotes the anthropologist Thom van Dooren’s claim that “experiencing beings like Penguins” also “inhabit an endlessly storied world”.
However, to turn the complex experiencing and inhabiting of the world that animals are no doubt capable of into a “story”, as understood by human beings, seems to betray the same kind of unsubstantiated generalisations – if one leaves aside the matter of anthropomorphism – that the confusion between the language of bees or trees and a language like Latin or Hindi would. To turn stories into a being’s memoried relationship to places etc. is also to turn them from fiction to fact, and turn language from an abstract system of largely arbitrary signs to perhaps a direct system of symbols. One simple indication of this resides in the realization that we do not just tell stories about what exists or existed but also about what never existed and might never exist (as Harari notes).
We tell stories or write poems not just about what we know or see but also what we have never known or seen or can possibly know or see. God and related matters are an obvious example. This complex activity is largely enabled by the fact that the language of human beings is a very different construct than the language of birds or bees though I am fully willing to concede that the difference would inevitably contain not just advantages but also disadvantages, not just something gained but also possibly something lost.
One can argue that, at least in some cases, the truth of a narrator’s “story” can be independently verified. For instance, if one person claims that a genocide did not take place in a village and another claims that it did, it might be possible (though, in real life, it is often very difficult) to objectively verify which claim is true. But even this solution, which is seldom possible in any case, given the “variables” involved, is not a real solution. Because it reduces stories to something else: an event, a happening, etc. What is proved or disproved is this event. The tendency to confirm a story – or any statement in a language – with reference to something outside it, is essentially the same as the insistence of the religious on a fundamentalist reading of their texts.
It posits a “God” whose prior existence smoothens out, justifies, and validates the text. However, the agnostic reading that literature demands, and teaches, takes place within the text, without ignoring its contexts. It is this that one fails to teach their students if literature is taught only as entertainment, politics, social realism, linguistic play etc. Not only is there no “fake news” inside literature, no matter how fanciful its narrative, the reading of literature as literature is the best way to learn to decipher the cries and accusations of “fake news” in the world.
Literature teaches us to tell the truth in language, in text and context, and not with reference to an outside power, whether God, event or fact. The “story” itself – as a version of “reality” and “language” – cannot be reduced to an event, which can or cannot be verified. One needs to approach the story as a story, with the “agnosticism” that I am talking about: the agnosticism of language when read as literature. The agnosticism of literature is not a matter of ambivalence, if ‘ambivalence’ is used in the sense of sitting comfortably on the fence. It is a much more disturbing matter.
Excerpted with permission from Literature Against Fundamentalism, Tabish Khair, Oxford University Press.
