Once upon a time, stories had a bad press. Avant-garde novelists and radical critics saw them as contrived and manipulative, a relic of auld indecency bequeathed to our sceptical age. In their own accounts of the end of story-telling, itself a story with a bad ending, the writers and critics forgot that stories are made as much as given and that humans are unlikely to live happily ever after the end of narrative. From the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter novels to the record audiences for Bachelors Walk and the mini-narratives of the Dunphy/Giles post-match analysis, our appetite for stories is as strong as it ever was.
On Stories sets out to explain in uncomplicated prose why stories are important to our lives. In doing so, Richard Kearney looks at a variety of genres from literary fiction to psychoanalytic case histories to cinema, history and mythology. He argues that it is essentially our ability to tell and listen to stories which makes us human.
This is because it is stories which allow us to bring the disparate elements of our lives into some kind of meaningful whole (telling our own story) and it is also stories which enable us to extend our range of human sympathy and imagine what it is like to be someone else (listening to the stories of others).
Kearney's chief virtue has always been pedagogical, as a gifted storyteller of ideas, and this work is no exception. The first and final parts are exemplary in this respect, providing a concise and morally robust defence of the importance of structured narratives for the way we make sense of our past, present and future and how we might move towards more humane forms of co-existence away from the killing fields of competing monologues.
He claims that mimesis in storytelling is not simply a question of holding up a mirror to the world, but it is a creative retelling of selected events in the world, so revealing hidden patterns and unexplored meanings. Although Kearney is eager to stress the element of the story in history, he is hostile to a relativist free-for-all where one historical story is as good as any other. Examining debates surrounding the Holocaust, he argues that truth-claims matter if only because to disallow such claims is to become complicit in the narrative final solution of the Nazis, the erasure of all traces of the victims.
If our sense of self is bound up with our ability to construct a narrative identity, a plausible story of our life, it is not always clear how this project continues to be possible in the world of fluid and unstable modernity. In an era of intense deregulation, fitful and frantic downsizing, rapid relocation and information overload, the principal difficulty, as Richard Sennett and others have pointed out, is trying to put together any coherent story of our lives. The danger is that in the neo-liberal utopia of the unfettered free market, life hi(stories) become sequential rather than meaningful, a disconcerting series of unpredictable and unrelated events. If that were to happen, On Stories would be a graphic reminder of how much we would have lost.
Michael Cronin is Dean of the Joint Faculty of Humanities, Dublin City University. He is co-editor with Luke Gibbons and Peadar Kirby of a forthcoming volume from Pluto Press entitled Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy