Why Stories Matter

[browngirl]

Oh NUMB3RS fandom, I love you and miss you and will return to proper participation as soon as I may! But till then, a post I read, a quotation used in it, and a thought.

color_blue wrote a great post about some of the problems with Slumdog Millionaire, and in it quoted Terry Pratchett. I decided to keep this in my files for the next time someone says "It's just fiction."

Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling... stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.

And the very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.

From what I've seen of humans, many of us, maybe most of us, organize our comprehension of reality along narrative lines; we see things in terms of stories. Give people a story that says, for instance, that society's problems are caused by X group dragging everyone else down, and we find that much more comprehensible than a bunch of economic equations. I was going to say more, but a small person crawled onto my foot, so I'll just wind this up to post it tomorrow.

Comments

[ilthit.livejournal.com]

This is why I love Pratchett. :D It's not the jokes.

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

The first time I really noticed his insight, I was amazed.

[madambackslash.livejournal.com]

Oh goodness, how you to both need to read his latest book, _Nation_, if you haven't already.

[madambackslash.livejournal.com]

TWO. TWO.

(I'm totally blaming the keyboard this time. Yep, yep.)

[sophinisba]

Thanks for that link!

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

Oh, you're very welcome. :)

[solvent90.livejournal.com]

I have *just* watched Slumdog Millionaire, so thank you for linking me to that post. I disagree comprehensively with most of it, except for some big points I need to Think Some More about, but found it useful and thought-provoking. Plus joy, as always, in being reminded of Terry Pratchett.

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

It is *so* good to hear from you! How have you been doing?

One of the reasons why color_blue's entry resonated with me was that I was recently complaining to a friend that depictions of Africa in the US are almost always of disaster, war, etc, and that they come with a subtext of "look at the horrid place we saved the African-Americans from! Wasn't slavery beneficial and civilizing?" (which I've had stated to me as text, too). It's not that these wars and famines don't exist, but it's frustrating to see them portrayed as the whole of African experience, and to see the uses that portrayal is put to. That said, I wouldn't be very happy with refusing to help people because it draws attention to wars and disasters either.

I've tried three times to make a cute metaphor about how none of us are the Borg, and failed, so I'll just say that my having found a lot to agree with and to learn in color_blue's entry doesn't mean I wouldn't in your reply to it, either; if you have time and energy for it, I'd love to read your thoughts.

And it's *always* nifty to see your name in my journal. :D

[solvent90.livejournal.com]

*waves* Hello! I've been doing well; things, generally, are looking up and it snowwed and March is nearly here. Yay!

Anyway. I'm still thinking about that post, especially what she says about the way the characters change as they grow up - something that struck me while I was watching, but which she articulates much more clearly than I was able to do. They do, suddenly, become terribly middle-class: accents, clothes, how they carry themselves, the English they speak to each other. I found that jarring at the time. I do think, generally, there are complex things going on with that movie that need drilling out; it isn't unproblematic feel-good fun and there were moments watching it when I felt acutely uncomfortable, or jarred, or unconvinced, or displaced. There was a white British woman sitting next to me at the screening, and she said to her friend, after it was over, that she supposed "that was the nearest she was ever going to get to India". Which - yes, made me cringe.

But my disagreement with the post, I guess, is with how the context of all that discomfort, that cringing sense, is explained: the framework of oppressive white British people versus oppressed Indians, and how potentially dodgy it is for British people to be telling Indian stories. That is part of the context of the story, sure. But it isn't, anyway, the locus of my particular discomfort; I never felt that sort of alienation watching the movie, no sense of the characters as tragic victims to be rescued and civilised by white Westerners, no sense that, well, there was anyone who didn't understand India and Indians in the room when the film was being made. I felt at home in the atmosphere of it; nothing rang false, really.

So I didn't feel that the story was for a Western audience, especially, or a white audience. I felt it was for me: the rich middle-class 20% of the Indian population who went to English medium schools and picked up precisely the accents of the characters in the movie, the ones whose parents (like mine) took over smoothly from the colonial administration after the British had left, the ones who drive past those children in sealed cars every day and learn not to make eye contact. And the current story of Incredible India and efficient Indian doctors and scientists and entrepreneurs which seems to be the current Western perception of the country, at least in Britain, is about that growing middle-class. And it is of course an accurate and pride-making and wonderful story, to some extent. But my impression is that some of the discomfort and anger I'm hearing expressed about Slumdog by my friends and family - the discomfort I felt watching the movie - comes from a sense of exposure, because it demonstrates the incompleteness of our story. That, hey, Dharavi is still there, just like it was the 1970s when my mum went there to vaccinate the kids as part of her med school training; that yes, our police torture people and ignore murder; that we seem to have murderous religious riots once a decade, or more often; that Mumbai is still run by criminals and gangsters; and those are real people who don't live in our insulated bubble but live through all of that and get by and sell us water on trains. That sense of exposure is what made me cringe and flinch in the cinema. And I think that sort of discomfort is frankly a good thing and we need to cope with it because it's better than nationalist myths, especially the dangerous one the Indian nationalist parties are trying to sell us right now.

So. Yes. That was long-winded. But what I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that depictions of India in the West aren't the same as depictions of Africa as you describe them but that the horrible subtext underneath, althoguh different, is kind of similar. India is now a shiny, thrusting capitalist success story. See how the Empire was beneficial and civilising! The truth, as always, is messier than that. And for all the problems with the movie, I think Danny Boyle - and Vikas Swarup, of course, whose novel it is - was trying to tell a single true story, or at least a myth that's tilted closer to true, and almost succeeds, and that's good enough for me.

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

I love it when you tell me things. You always say you've been long-winded right after you've explained a concept in an eloquent and organized manner.

I see what you mean, too, and I think it's really interesting, the way these mythical depictions of nations and regions are used, and the ways all of us grapple with the problems in our societies, and define what our societies are, and the underlying patterns (colonialization? conflict? class? humanity?) that can be seen.

You are so wondrously thinky. :)

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

Er... Seconded.

Fiction can be far more powerful than the truth, because storytelling is so universal, and its roots are so primal in all of us.

A thousand persuasive, logical, angry arguments against slavery by real abolitionists didn't change the minds of 1% of the people who wept over the fate of a fictional slave in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel (and who voted accordingly).

To this day the two most efficacious ways of teaching something are stories and games.

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

*grin* You know I agree with you, so let me coo over your icon. Coo!