ONE STORY. THAT’S ALL there is, all there ever has been, all there ever will be. And it’s more than enough. I’ve talked about this idea elsewhere, so I won’t belabor it here, but it is really pretty simple. Everything we humans tell ourselves and each other is part of a single, gigantic narrative, which is the story of being human. As soon as humans acquired the ability to communicate in language and began gathering around the campfire to relate the events of the day’s hunt, that story began. What they did next—I’m guessing here, but evidential record tilts strongly in this direction—is to move from reportage to mythmaking. The first story was almost certainly something on the order of “Ralph Gets Trampled by the Mastodon—Film at Eleven.” But I don’t think it took very long at all to begin making sense of the world in which Ralph could get trampled by a mastodon, in which Ralph the Flint Knapper was around one moment and gone the next. The prospect of imminent death not only sharpens the mind wonderfully; it begins the flow of questions. Big questions. Thinking on last things almost necessarily prompts thoughts of first things: How did we get here? How did the world look before us? Was there a before-us, is there a higher power than ourselves? What does it look like, act like, think of us? What happens when we die? Where did Ralph go? Little things like that.
What makes you so sure?
I’ve lived around people long enough to see that the impulse to recount their lives is hardwired into the human brain. And while I’m no anthropologist and so may have missed something, every society I know of has creation myths, which are tied up in a narrative of divinity. Once you have those two elements, reportage and mythologizing, you have the elements for the rest of human communication. I’m just not sure which side of the ledger corporate quarterly reports go on.
Fiction—that body of story about things manifestly not true—came later. Our first fiction grew out of stories of human interaction with the divine. This is what the late, great critic Northrop Frye called the displacement of myth, pure myth (something that only exists in a sort of theoretical realm) being translated into stories involving humans. These are sacred texts and hero tales in which humans have direct contact with gods in ways we ordinary sorts never experience. Is your mother a goddess (well, of course, but I mean literally)? Has she brought you armor forged in a divine smithy lately? Have you experienced any voices emanating from whirlwinds or burning bushes? I’m neither endorsing nor denying the veracity of any stories here, merely pointing out that the earliest human narratives always involve the divine world in a way that the works of, say, Samuel Beckett do not. Epics and sacred texts stand on those two bases, reportage and mythmaking, telling what happened and saying what it all means.
So does the novel. What else is there, really? A detailed account of events and lives, a sense of how those events and lives express the universe in which they, and we, exist. The events may be the Napoleonic Wars or a trip up an escalator to a mezzanine, but that’s just detail; the basic function is unchanged whether the writer is Tolstoy or Nicholson Baker. The significance, the mythic level, may be an expression of the divine in the smallest details or an assertion of the emptiness of it all. Neither matters very much from the point of view of this examination. What matters is that they are all, in whatever their particulars, iterations of the One Story. And therefore, they are all related.
So, does it matter? That they’re all connected, that is?
Very much. For one thing, we can tease out connections between this work and that, tracing the intertextual play as I suggested when I enjoined you to read with your ears. You listen, you hear the texts talking to one another. You find layers of meaning you would never sense if you kept the walls up between works. Schools of criticism since about 1960, what was called structuralism and then (horrors!) post-structuralist criticicism, including deconstruction, have emphasized “texts” over “writers” in what strikes me as a fatally flawed initial premise. Yet part of their program makes abundant of sense, and it is this: writing is in some ways bigger than the writer. Writers understand their own reading and to some extent that of the writers who have influenced them. If you are influenced by Joyce, you know that he has in turn read Flaubert and Aquinas and Henrik Ibsen and Homer, among many others. But which ones? How many? And whom did they read, listen to, accept, reject? It is impossible to trace out a complete genealogy of any writer because the network has too many strands, which are in turn made up of too many other strands. Besides, where did Joyce get all those jokes?
One possible danger, or so it would seem, is that if all stories are part of one Ur-story, then if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all. Instead, it works the other way. You can have read a hundred novels, experienced all sorts of fascinating and dull characters, noted all sorts of narrative tricks, but you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. There will always be another novelist, and another, and another, who will do something you haven’t quite seen yet. Moreover, those networks lead you from writer to writer, if you’re the inquisitive sort, and pretty soon you’re reading people you never thought you would. Reading novels is a little like eating popcorn: once you start, there’s no stopping. Let’s say you remember reading the short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce when you were in school. You look on Amazon for what else he might have done and discover that a Mexican novelist, Carlos Fuentes, has a small novel, The Old Gringo, in which Bierce (or someone very Bierce-like) plays the title role. Then you discover that Fuentes says that all Hispanic fiction comes from Don Quixote, and he mentions other novelists. And that’s just the start.
Or maybe you’ve been reading picaresque novels of modern misbehavior. A little Augie March, a dollop of Kerouac, perhaps more J. P. Donleavy than is strictly good for you, a touch of Alan Sillitoe. Eventually you’re going to find out that postwar America and Britain didn’t invent the rascal-hero, and that knowledge can take you places. Okay, maybe Grimmelshausen’s The Adventurous Simplicissimus won’t be your first stop, since the Thirty Years War may not be your idea of a good time. But bad actors doing funny, outrageous things were a staple in the eighteenth century, and England was a center of mischief, so you could try Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews, or maybe something by Tobias Smollett. Then those writers lead, for a host of reasons, to other writers. Maybe Defoe leads to more Defoe, something like Robinson Crusoe, and you find that more than two centuries later a writer in a very different place, J. M. Coetzee in South Africa, wrote a novel called Foe, which reimagines a story we all thought we knew. And from there, who can tell?
So be forewarned: this path leads nowhere, and everywhere, and it goes on forever. Books lead to books, ideas to ideas. You can wear out a hundred hammocks and never reach the end. And that’s the good news.
Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.