Last week’s look at the unique virtues of story covered its ability to invest the world with meaning and its power to teach what I termed an ‘aesthetic conscience’, an instinct towards beauty in all parts of life. Today we’ll look at two more types of instruction stories excel in giving, both of them more mundane than the first two; both, moreover, are an element of the other three, though in different ways.

Human Nature

Stories teach us about people with a thoroughness, depth, and applicability that non-narrative generally cannot approach. Non-narrative works, psychological theses and systematic lay-outs about human nature, books on manipulation and leadership and crowd psychology, step-by-step instructions for therapy or relationships or breaking off a partnership, they all have some place (and too often a place in hell). Many offer insight and instruction worth taking. They cannot, however, grasp the whole man as the story does. Man is more than an arrangement of disparate parts; he is a whole being, body and soul, reason and emotion and appetite and vigor and instinct and conscience and relationship. That last point is particularly important. Stories can portray relationships holistically, realistically, as living, breathing things, changing across time but also continuous, influenced from without by a thousand factors.¹

The use of stories, then, is to understand humans in general, to understand ourselves, and to understand others specifically. Let’s take each in order. First, stories will present a more-or-less true reflection of human nature. A story which presumes man is basically good, as much of modern literature does, or that morality is bosh, that story is doing a very bad job of reflecting truth (and at some level the author knows it, as per Romans 1). A story which portrays man as he is- fallen or saved, defined in relation to God, meant for maturity and righteousness-² this story tells the truth well.

And how does it tell that truth? It tells it in two ways: first by how it portrays people as a mass, how crowds react, how nations and populations act; and second by how it portrays people as individuals, from side characters to protagonists to antagonists. In this second, it begins to teach about us and about others (these are two sides of the same coin). By living life with the people on the page, we learn to understand them both as they understand themselves and as is actually true. Here already is a valuable lesson for us: to know the difference between self-image and truth. We learn also by how they are like us and how unlike. We come to understand ourselves further because we are impelled to see our lives from the outside, even to live them from the outside, and thus to gain perspective in paltry imitation of Him.

So we learn about ourselves by comparison and contrast, by experience, but we also learn about others. We learn to see in the crotchety neighbor an actual person, not a humanoid irritant; we learn that beneath the appearances we see and indeed at their foundation, each man, woman, and child is an immortal soul³ in a body bound for the grave. We learn to see hidden emotions, virtues, vices, motives, and histories. We learn also that the human heart is capable of great evil, great good, great deception, great valor.

By living in proxy on the page, we are taught to better understand man and the Image of God in him in a way which prompts wisdom, both in ourselves and others. Samwise Gamgee prepares us to understand loyalty, to emulate it, to seek it in others, to understand when others display it even to our detriment, to even then admire it appropriately.⁴ Gorlim (from Beren and Luthien by J.R.R. Tolkien) prepares us to understand treachery but also familial love, to understand when a man’s affections are more than his fidelity to a pact will bear, to abhor the treachery but also to sympathize with that which prompted it (for it was good before it was twisted). Grendel (Beowulf) prepares us to understand vicious pettiness, men who exercise power for the pleasure of it, who spite righteousness for the smallest excuse.⁵

Wisdom and Experience

All this time, a theme has been emerging: stories teach by experience, by bringing us so deep in that in a sense we live what the story tells us of. This proxy experience is clearer, less self-clouded, much more simple than real experience, but it is effective nonetheless. It is this proxy experience which inculcates greater understanding of others into us, which carves the patterns of aesthetic conscience deeper into us (or rather, clears them of gunk),⁶ which connects meaning and value to us and the world around us.

This learning method is also called ‘learning by example.’ After all, when we learn from an example, what do we do? We take it, incorporate it into our experience as an experience that we could have had, and act on it, on the proxy experience.⁷ So when we read a story, we consciously or unconsciously ask ourselves, ‘What would I do here? How would I react to this circumstance or that person? What would happen if I did that? How would it differ from what happens when he acts?’ A second layer too follows: ‘Was that the right thing to do? What is the right thing to do? How effective was it? Was it worth it? How do I balance what was effective verses what seems right?’⁸

When I read The Lord of the Rings, it was born to me with force I could not ignore that Frodo’s path was a hard one; I understood too that while I will bear no One Ring, my path will be run far from sunshine and roses all too often (here my knowledge of history was an unpleasant aid in recognition). I had experienced at a remove what Frodo endured, how long he went without bending, the utter agony it took to bring a lapse. I had lived a measure of it, having read Frodo’s story, and that experience has never left me, has shaped me in how I look at the world, how I think of the future, how I estimate myself and my virtue relative to what I may face. So too will any thoughtful reader find, when he reads the right book.

This proxy experience allows us to reach places and ideas and circumstances we cannot easily, quickly, or (particularly this one) safely reach, to prepare ourselves for the challenges, mundane or exotic, which God will give to us to overcome. It gives us exercise too in considering the ‘past,’ a lesson which it behooves us to apply to the present and future. By this I mean that it guides us to contrast what happened with what we desired or expected to happen, to consider why things turned out the way they did.

If we go a little more a-field, we can see that stories even teach us that very important skill of understanding the past without idolizing it. A story is, in a sense, a crystallized span of time. Once we have reached the ending, we know that the story will not change. This is, of course, variably true; video game stories are certainly capable of change, as well as CYOA novelties, and who among us has not dreamed up ‘what could have been.’⁹ But it is true that the story as it is written is inflexible, unchanging. That is the story the author gave us; that is the story we read; now we must, while remembering it, accept that it happened and step forward on that ground (even if occasionally we return to certain parts, to ‘memories’, for the joy of them or the tutelage). This aspect of story’s teaching is, perhaps, a little farther from universal than most of what I have said, but it is nevertheless valuable.¹⁰

Conclusion (For Real)

Do not take this as an exhaustive look at what story’s can do, how they can benefit us. Certainly I’ve only scratched the surface even of those elements I’ve brought up. Story is a complex and beautiful thing, a great gift of God to us, to imitate Him in creating. By story we lift people into other lives (proxy experience), show them the truth of persons in whom they recognize parts of themselves and of others (human nature), clarify to their eyes the often-vague but immensely important beauty of the world (aesthetic conscience), and invest the world with a weight worth living in (meaning-connection). Let us rejoice in this, and may your labors be fruitful.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – A caution here: stories are unavoidably less complex than reality. Don’t take me as saying stories perfectly reproduce people. They don’t; even the story of an omniscient, infallible author could not do so, because the medium of story as we produce it simply isn’t big enough for even a single person (necessarily, no person can fully conceive of another, equally sized (in terms of information) person). Only God’s story can match reality’s complexity because His story is that which we call reality, a secondary reality to His primary reality (Gen. 1:1).

2 – I recommend R.J. Rushdoony’s Revolt Against Maturity if you want a work-out for your brain. It’s interesting, if flawed, and avoids his more distasteful ideas (by which I mean, it doesn’t get into his very-badly-argued stance against racially mixed marriages).

3 – Though for the damned, it is immortal death, a phrase oxymoronic by virtue of ‘immortal’ being imprecise and ‘death’ sometimes misunderstood.

4 – Loyalty to sin is only slightly admirable, as while loyalty is a virtue, loyalty to sin is itself great sin. Loyalty, in sum, becomes greater the greater the duty it accompanies, the greater the virtue it is built around. So loyalty of son to father is a great thing indeed (yet it can be intercut with vice if that loyalty is transposed to be also loyalty to the father’s sin).

I hasten to add that loyalty to sin is not, in the end, true loyalty, for sin destroys true loyalty and leaves only selfish lust for sin, a lust masquerading as loyalty, using its name for credibility. So a man who is arrogant may claim it is to honor his ancestor’s greatness, but it will resolve in the end only to honoring himself.

5 – With a book whose understanding of human nature is flawed to the point of complete unusability (a rare quality indeed in any work of artistic merit but, I think, theoretically possible), there still remains a person the story portrays with a sort of unintentional truth: the author. Candide tells more of men in telling of Voltaire than in any of its characters, and I would guess (though I have not read it) that Sartre’s work probably falls into the camp. Another example of this can be found in semi-narrative works like Plato’s various discourses (which are actually not hard reading, if you’re interested in that sort of thing and have a firm grounding in Scripture to point out the errors aplenty). All stories outside of Scripture will be flawed in their depiction of men, but this singular portrayal (present in Scripture too, both in depicting the human and the Divine authors) will be present, will be an available teacher, because all stories tell a hidden story of their author.

Just be careful not to read into a story something that isn’t there, as is too easily done with such an approach; it can quickly become an exercise in mirror-gazing (the kind where what is seen matches only what is expected or desired) rather than in learning from another.

6 – I subscribe to a semi-Realist position with shades of Conceptualism and Nominalism both, meaning I approximate parts of Plato’s epistemology. If this sentences makes no sense to you, by the way, just roll your eyes at the philosophy terms.

7 – Something, something, ontology both prior and integral to epistemology.

8 – These two coincide perfectly, in God’s world, but our ability to figure out what is right, when we’re working from Scripture, is often much more reliable than our ability to figure out what’s effective. Moreover, the morality is prior to the efficacy in logic and importance, an order utilitarianism reverses for both qualities.

9 – See also: fanfiction.

10 – If I haven’t been clear in this paragraph, please comment and tell me. I’m unsure if I’m not relying on context other people don’t have (on books, thoughts, and teachers that I have made my own unique mix of, as all people, on my personal story).