A Unified Field Theory of Story

Absorbed reading, whether of romance novellettes or literary classics is essentially a right-hemisphere dominated, trance inducing experience, in which we ‘enter’ a fictional world, ‘live as’ its hero or heroine, and feel with them, and for them. Mirror neurones fire because as Brian Boyd points out, we have evolved to play close attention to other human beings, to imitate what they do and to value what they value. This, after all, is how we learn, and how culture is transmitted within human societies. Whether those other humans beings are real or fictional is immaterial. — Hugh Crago, Entranced by Story.

Ever since becoming a media teacher, I have read more and more books about audio/video editing and storytelling to try and better understand what I am teaching to the students. But of course, I’m also interested too! “Entranced by Story: Brain, Tale and Teller, from Infancy to Old Age” is a book that I found in our campus library back in March. It’s an unassuming looking book published by Routledge. It doesn’t have a New York Times top ten clickbait title like: “Story Power! How the Art of Writing Can Dramatically Transform your Life!” — and so at first glance, I wasn’t sure if I was going to borrow it or not.

But standing in the aisle, I had a little bit of a read, and thought: why not? I was also surprised to find that the author Hugh Crago lives in the Blue Mountains, which are only a few hours from where I live in Western Sydney.

And though the book is only 230 pages long, I have had to keep borrowing and re-borrowing it, extending my loan for most of the year, as I could only read a few pages a night before bed. There were so many new ideas in here, that was all I could manage to process at a time — and I didn’t want to rush through them for the sake of completing a book.

Basically, the author has a background in teaching literature, as well as counselling at an academic level, and the book mentions that (at the time of publication, 2014) he has a counselling practice in Katoomba.

It’s hard to put all the facets of this book into words, but it is essentially about storytelling, how the author believes it affects us at the various stages of our lives, from both the two perspectives of the reader and the creator, starting with the child’s experiences of stories, going right through to old age and the decline of creative powers.

He bases his main theory around the bicameral mind theory of Julian Jaynes, which I had only a vague knowledge of. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was a book that came out in 1977, and is where the idea of left-brain/right-brain distinctions come from (left is inclined towards logic, the right brain to emotions).

In the case of storytelling, Crago uses this to explain the appeal of certain archetypal stories, like fairy tales, having their roots in the right brain — where more psychological novels and stories of personality and character would lean more towards the left. But in an ideal creative situation, the two sides would work holistically together (right side pours the story out, as the left does the editing/revision, and considers the audience).

But he also draws on the idea that reading is an act of co-creation: the reader sometimes recognises a work, a story, that reflects something in their spirit, and they bring their own life experiences to flesh out the descriptions of the author’s words in their imagination, through the creative act of reading.

That there are so many ideas that appealed to me in this book, is an understatement.

I liked the way Crago identifies three types of ways we consume stories: as listeners, readers and viewers — which in my mind, would correlate with audio stories, books and movies — which I think this is a great distinction! And each of these would create a different experience for their audience: film is a kind of spoonfeeding of sight and sound, whereas both books and audio stories have that co-creation factor built into the experience, where the ‘theatre of the mind’ plays a big role by filling in the unpainted parts.

But also, at various stages of the book, Crago identifies archetypal places and settings that writers and other storytellers explore: ‘the place of greater safety’, the ‘dome of air’, ‘the ruined place’, and these symbolise certain emotional states that we might encounter in life’s journey.

Crago is mainly coming from the world of books and writing, using examples like Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, The Magus by John Fowles, and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis – as well as older stories like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Odyssey by Homer. He looks at the lives of people like Janet Frame, Charles Dickens, Iris Murdoch — even Adolph Hitler, as examples of different types of creators and the lives they led, and the strange patterns that sometimes haunt their work.

And he points out the different imperatives that are driving their stories, but also what they all have in common as creative people (often, they are good ‘noticers’ as well as needing to ‘perform’ their interests, as opposed to ‘interrogating’ them, a left side need). Writers always start out as readers first, but not all readers (need to) become writers.

There is so much to this book, that it is one of the best things I have read in twenty years. I wanted to constantly rip out quotes from it. But that would be like stopping constantly on a bush walk to take photos of the trees.

And in a way, I do think this book gives away some great secrets about how to tell an appealing story. In not such a direct way, Crago points out that stories written with a didactic goal in mind are almost dead in the water. Even Aesops fables, with their little explanation at the end, can ruin the emotional and deeply intuitive understanding of a story, that occurs almost at an unconscious level with the right side of the brain. In a way, he is hinting that stories almost have a magical property that maybe we do not completely understand; but they definitely have a psychological power that does not lend itself to material or selfish goals. Stories occupy a more profound position in our human needs.

He sees the appeal for us of a story’s journey as the same ‘seeking’ instinct that animals have, like a wolf threading through a forest looking for something. And that certain types of stories, like a romance, as representing a universal human concern with finding a suitable mate, which I find hard to disagree with.

There must be a protagonist — someone with whom a listener, reader or viewer can temporarily merge — and the sequence of events in which we ‘live as the protagonist’ must make enough sense for us to want to continue to ‘be’ them. There must be a sense that we are ‘going somewhere’ — even though we won’t necessarily know where. In this way, a successful story must re-create in us the sensations of ‘seeking’ that we share with other creatures. — From the Conclusion.

If you were wanting to read this book, it is something that you could get through an interlibrary loan at your local library — or find at a university library! And it’s worth the effort to find it!

Header Image by Chen YiChun / Unsplash