Why Do We Tell Stories? To Make Sense of the World?

The long list for Canada's biggest fiction prize, the Scotia Bank Giller, was announced a few day ago, and it looks like the heavy money is on Joseph Boyden's  The Orenda, which focuses on the clash of cultures between First Nations and Jesuit missionaries in 17th-century Huronia.  Haven't read it, but it appears to be the back story in effect, for his two previous novels about Canadian First Nation people,  Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce.  

Those two books provide not only good story telling but also window on to the world of the people who were in Canada before Europeans arrived, and what they became afterwards. As such these novels demonstrate, I think, the role that the book plays in the continued health of civilization because stories are important tools in making sense of the world. (The image of Tom Thomson's Forest, 1916, when Boyden's people were losing their forests.)

One of the striking things bout Roberto Bolaño’s astounding By Night in Chile is the way the narrator escapes from the evil abroad during the Pinochet regime in Chile by re-reading philosophers.

In Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, the illiterate woman whom the narrator loves is captivated by books, and may be said to find her personal salvation in learning how to read and learning to repent for what she’d done as a Nazi guard.

InMuriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog the concierge Renée soars above her surroundings by reading the classics of Western literature—as well as watching a lot of good films (from Blade Runner to Ozu’s artistic wonders) and listening to good music.

But it was a recent discussion of Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones that gives me the most food for thought. In it, the one white man left on the island of Bougainville during a time of intense suffering and civil war reads Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations to children who have no other book. The story captivates them, and when the book is burnt along wit the village, they attempt to retrieve bits of it, as both an exercise in survival and a way of thinking about other things than the destruction around them. Yet at the end of the book we learn that the version Mr. Watts read was not the real one, but a simplified, maybe even crudely changed one.

The moral (if any) is: If we don’t have a story, we’ll invent one.

BTW here's an interesting look at the background to Mister Pip,  a documentary made in the 1990s about the troubles on Bougainville.The clash of cultures has quite a bit in common with what Boyden writes about.