Shaped by Stories: The Ethical Power of Narratives

Chapter Seven

97 Chapter Seven Y Ethics of Narrative in a Practical Vein Ethical Invitations in Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Grave” What Keeps Us Hooked—or Not? A full account of narrative transactions raises the question of why we so seldom avail ourselves of our absolute freedom to walk out on any voluntary narrative interaction at any time. I have suggested some of the reasons that lie within us—our general desires for learning, pleasure , companionship, and so on—but now I want to analyze some of the reasons that are located in narrative themselves rather than in general human motives. It takes more than initial assent to keep us bonded over time. What stratagems do stories employ that create the kinds of deep bonding with readers that previous quotations describe? Another way to ask this question is, what are stories’ delivery systems ? What kinds of hooks allow the story out there to become a gripping sequence of mental events in here, inside my head and heart? This analysis must show how a reader’s or viewer’s initial assent may begin in human need, as I have previously suggested, but also gets worked up by the story such that it becomes a patterned set of responses, shaped and 98 s h a p e d b y s t o r i e s directed from word one to word last (or from scene one to scene last, and so on, depending on the story’s medium) by such means as building suspense, creating sympathy, developing belief, structuring desire, and generating such emotions as indignation and satisfaction, likes and dislikes , hopes and anxieties, gratification and frustration, and so on. Responses to Narratives Are Directed, Not Random or Purely Idiosyncratic We do not decide willy-nilly which characters in stories we want to see rewarded and punished. If we were all making independent and random responses, it would be hard to explain why everyone in a movie laughs at the same time, feels suspense at the same time, and feels gratified or scared at the same time. If human beings’ default responses to stories were random or idiosyncratic, there would be no way to explain why no one ever sides with the wolf over the three little pigs or with Claudius over Hamlet or with Jack Palance over Alan Ladd in Shane or with Darth Vader over Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. No one ever thinks that Anna Karenina is slapstick or weeps for Elmer Fudd. But if we are not reacting to stories randomly, then it follows that some kind of deliberately deployed stimuli are effectively patterning our responses, not just poking them. What are the strategies that accomplish this patterning? The rakish smile of the hero in an action film is not just a product of Jude Law’s or Jackie Chan’s or Samuel Jackson’s good looks. That rakish smile is an aesthetic strategy (a technical achievement on the actor’s part), and it is designed, first, to project an ethos for the character and, second, to make story consumers like (or dislike) that ethos. In real life, a rakish smile may be a habitual smirk, or it may be an accident, or it may be a sign of gas pain. In a narrative, however, that smile, and all other such details, are deliberately developed cues that prompt readers and viewers to assent to—or to make—the judgments, beliefs, or feelings that they must make if the story is to succeed. That the central character of Mary McCarthy’s short story “Artists in Uniform” is wearing Ferragamo shoes is not a random detail. It is an aesthetic strategy that positions the character’s social class relative to the Ethics of Narrative in a Practical Vein 99 unsophisticated Midwesterners in the club car of the train she is traveling on, and also makes readers see her as an East Coast sophisticate and an intellectual snob. In short, the reference to Mary McCarthy’s shoes (the shoes were indeed hers; she later wrote about the autobiographical dimensions of the story, and even uses her own name in the story itself) leads us to experience certain emotions, to refer to certain concepts, and to make certain ethical judgments (on the presumption that we find the reverse snobbery of Midwestern hicks, as well as Eastern intellectuals and their straightforward snobbery, both blameworthy). Plot as Ethical Trajectory Most people...