Story Structures
To begin to answer the question of what stories can offer to a world unsettled by change, we must confront the structures of the stories themselves.
Aristotle’s dramatic structure has persisted as a common structure of fictional narratives, where plots progress towards moments of crisis where a protagonist or hero finds triumph or falls. Aristotelian tragedy points towards three different understandings of narrative. The first is the importance of crisis in narrative plots. Secondly, there is an instrumental function for affecting the audience in emotional ways, specifically catharsis. Third, Aristotelian narratives must always be understood as representation and imitation. To begin to answer the question of what stories can offer to a world unsettled by change, we must confront the structures of the stories themselves.
However, Le Guin rejects the primacy of linear, crisis-centric stories:
I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us (Le Guin 1986, 151).
Here, stories are structures that hold and contain. As containers, stories place “things” in “a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” In other words, stories make (and unmake) connections and relationships between “things” and readers. The medical aspect of Le Guin’s medicinal carrier bag resembles Aristotle’s catharsis in its ability to intensely – perhaps viscerally – affect readers. Catharsis is not the purpose of her fiction, but one of many affects that stories may have on readers. What Le Guin resists in the Aristotelian model of narrative is not the functional, instrumental aspect of catharsis, but rather the direct, pointed linearity that presupposes stories to have clear heroes that either perish or triumph at the end.
For Bruno Latour, the story of technology is a chapter in the story of modernity:
The dominant, peculiar story of modernity is of humankind’s emancipation from Nature. Modernity is the thrusting-forward arrow of time — Progress — characterized by its juvenile enthusiasm, risk taking, frontier spirit, optimism, and indifference to the past. The spirit can be summarized in a single sentence: “Tomorrow, we will be able to separate more accurately what the world is really like from the subjective illusions we used to entertain about it.
Science is the shibboleth that defines the right direction of the arrow of time because it, and only it, is able to cut into two well-separated parts what had, in the past, remained hopelessly confused: a morass of ideology, emotions, and values on the one hand, and, on the other, stark and naked matters of fact (Latour 2012).
The “story of modernity” that Latour criticizes is defined by a forward pointing arrow. “Science” is at the forefront of this arrow, moving the “story” forward towards the optimist’s “emancipation from Nature” or the pessimist’s “fall.” For optimists, “Science” affords a clean separation between things: future and past, reality and illusion, values/emotions and facts. Science delineates these things and is “right,” or correct. However, Latour rejects this ideology of separation and “emancipation.” Instead of looking to “Science” to separate humans and Nature, future and past, illusion and reality, fact and value, we should be seeking intimacy and attachment.
The theoretical framework that emerges from this discussion of fictional structure is has three main facets:
- Stories hold and define relationships in networks that yield meaning.
- Stories are pieces of technology that function as non-human actors in networks. The contents of stories are also actors in that network.
- Stories foster connection both within and without their borders, thus becoming places readers can go and be.
Ecocriticism?
Like the debate between instrumental and inherent value for the humanities, ecocriticism is motivated by two pillars that seem to be at odds. The first is the investigation of connections between humans and non-humans through the examination of literary texts. The second is to address (experienced or foreseen) changes that many perceive or predict threaten earth systems and human survival. The first is a carrier bag; the second is a forward thrusting arrow.
The outstanding question is: how can ecocriticism reconcile its two pillars? How can you fit a bag around a line? How might this question show a middle ground between inherent and instrumental justifications for the humanities? I argue that ecocriticism can better investigate the concerns of its first pillar.