As someone who believes in the power of stories and the importance of narrative, even I feel like I’m going to puke when I hear someone start off an interview or a presentation talking about the power of stories.
It’s a cliche, often an insincere schtick from a consultant or marketer who is just trying to drum up a clientele. In that form, it’s usually followed with something like “human beings are hard-wired to love stories” or “we evolved as story-tellers”, a set of bland truisms. Rarely are you going to hear someone making this pitch talk about what makes a story a story, or how you can talk to people without telling a story in some way.
Even the dullest slidedeck presentation has a beginning, a middle and an end, which is a formal attribute that makes something a story of sorts. There is at least a story of every pitch, presentation, infosession, training, workshop, etc, a way to narrate what happened that combines what the presenter did, what the presentation said, and what the audience did in reaction to that. Thinking of information that absolutely refuses narrativity takes a lot of theoretical work, even though there have been quite a few scholars and intellectuals, including among historians, who have tried very hard to escape narrative either as a rhetorical mode of communicating or as a structure of knowledge production.
I think if you want to understand the power of stories a little better, you have to look at an actual case of an event that had an intense “story-ness” to it. A great example of that is the escape and now capture of the convict Danelo Cavalcante in Pennsylvania, not far from where I’m writing.
Cavalcante escaped on August 31st. For a day or two, it was mostly a local story as schools near the prison closed and there were police check-points on roads near the prison. Then national and international interest rose, as it often does with prison escapes.
Cavalcante’s crime (murdering his girlfriend in front of children) was horrific, and there were no questions about his guilt. But as the interest in the story grew, the tone around the story was often curiously light-hearted. No one wanted to see him go free, everyone agreed that people in the area needed to be fearful, and yet in some sense it felt as if many people following the story were wishing that the story could go on. On social media, there was as much engagement with criticizing police for their seeming ineptitude as there was hoping for a swift capture and restoration of safety from a murderous threat.
I think an escape like this draws attention because we don’t know what’s going to happen next. We are over-saturated with narratives that are entirely predictable, highly manipulated, repeated incessantly. And with stories whose endings may be unpredictable but are drenched in universal dread and anger. Often, experts come along to try and reassure us that those stories are actually quite predictable and we should stop worrying: no, the economy is not going to crash; no, there won’t be a new civil war; no, Trump isn’t going to win and establish a dictatorship. But I think mostly we don’t buy it and yet none of us enjoy the experience of dwelling on those kinds of uncertainties. Those are the unpredictable stories that keep you up at night, that make you stockpile canned foods.
But when a story comes along that has that deliciously unthreatening sense of “what’s going to happen next?” and where the uncertainty is genuine? We don’t get enough of that at all in our lives. Reality shows pretend to that uncertainty, but we know it’s mostly bogus. Sports really wants that unpredictability, but it’s surprisingly hard to obtain and isn’t always fun when it involves something like an out-for-the-season hamstring injury.
As one person living in the area where Cavalcante was ultimately caught said, “I’ve seen stuff you don’t expect to see”. People hung on the details of the story as it developed: how did he get out? How is it that they couldn’t find him even though he kept showing up on cameras at Longwood Gardens? How did he manage to steal a dairy van? Why weren’t the houses of his former associates being watched? What’s his plan? Where is he going?
The details invited everyone following to think their way into the story. What would you do if you were trying to avoid police? Where would you look if you were the police? And the details reminded everybody of how the world has changed—how Ring cameras and other surveillance make it hard to imagine hiding anywhere for long without extensive prior preparation. (I’ve never had that point driven home more than by seeing that the Unabomber’s cabin hideaway is now fully reconstructed and available for viewing at something called the FBI Experience.)
So the next time someone starts up by talking about the power of stories, wait and see if they do the unexpected thing and identify the unpredictable as one of the major attractions of a story. I doubt it, because most of the salespeople selling stories see them as masterful form for the delivery of predictable messages and controlled experiences. That is precisely what people do not crave; there is nothing worse than a story where you already know from the moment the first word is spoken where every single beat will fall.
What drew people to the Cavalcante escape, even if they knew that his eventual capture was nearly assured simply because it was hard to imagine how he could avoid the authorities and also find food, shelter, and water enough to go on, was the possibility—however unlikely—that he would remain at-large, that he’d show up tomorrow on a camera in Reading or Ephrata or Maxatawny or that he’d just disappear altogether into the mythic space occupied by D.B. Cooper and the Anglin Brothers.
Nobody was rooting for him, not really. But they were rooting for liberation from the routinized and predictable, from the stories that are told ploddingly by the pundits and hucksters. That is one of those weights on our collective lives that we never fully feel until the moment that it is briefly lifted.