What Storytelling Really Is
… as opposed to what marketing people define it as.
While I understand the importance of narrative and storytelling in the work of marketers and advertises, this is one of the cooptations/adaptations in the industry that really pains me. Like paradigm shifts, storytelling/narrative is a wondrous and powerful idea that is trivialized when it gets thrown about in business. A recent review in The Nation of Salman Rushdie’s Imaginative New ‘Enchantress of Florence’ is a wonderful re-grounding of what narrative and story really means to people. (It also reminds us that book reviewing can itself be an art form.)
The novel, on its fourth page, is finding its subject, and its subject is storytelling itself. The men are driven by hungers and thirsts, and so is the writing. In its greedy piling up of nouns–”hostelries, saloons, food stalls, and hawkers”; “Cloths, utensils, baubles, weapons, rum”–we feel the force of storytelling’s appetite for the world, its sheer sensual relish for the thingness of things. It is no surprise that the great compendiums of stories tend to swell virtually without limit: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the Decameron and the Thousand and One Nights, Don Quixote and Gargantua and Pantagruel. This is the same impulse, of course–under stricter regulation in The Enchantress of Florence–that gives Rushdie’s greatest novels their girth.
I love the phrase “greedy piling up of nouns” and the sense of fullness the passage conveys. I’m also fond of how the review picks up on the importance of cities in stories and culture:
for Rushdie, the city is storytelling’s supreme subject. Delhi, Karachi, Cochin, New York, above all Bombay, the city of his childhood (”Back to Bom!” is Saleem’s happiest thought in Midnight’s Children), and London, the city of his maturity (”Ellowen Deeowen,” The Satanic Verses calls it, yoking Semitic and Indo-European divinities in a numinous pun on the spelling of the city’s name). The city, for Rushdie, is the place of variety, mystery, fortuity, possibility, conflict–all the elements that most make for good stories. It is the place where strange people live next door and unimaginable worlds are waiting to be discovered on the next block, a place that invites you, as the title of his latest essay collection urges, to “step across this line.”
City here, is more a gathering of people with broader-than-tribal coincidental affililiations, and therefore a place of discovery. Not to discredit the much- and recently-vaunted small towns (from which I come), but I love the sense of magic that surrounds stories, cities, and even trade in this review.
On the work-related side of this, those who bandy narrative and story about might still benefit from this definition (and the underlying energy) to get beyond the A to B nature of story. Story is too often seen as a distilled beginning, middle, and end with connective tissue. Here, it’s more rollicking, intricate, layered, recursive, and rich in bewildering detail.
I have Kindled Rushdie’s book and plan to get to it as soon as I find out what happens between Mister Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett.