When you call something a story, you have to qualify it or be more specific, because depending on the context it means a true story or a false story. You hear it in common usage all the time, and you do it yourself. Someone tells you that he won the lottery yesterday and bought a new house for cash, and you tell him not to make up stories like that. Someone else tells you that she’s going to tell you the story of how she got lost in the rainstorm, and you settle in for what you have no reason to assume is going to be anything but the truth. And of course, before you correctly point it out to me, the opposite could be the case. Even though I’ve heard that your chance of winning the lottery is the same as your chance of being struck by lightning while being attacked by a shark, well, someone does end up winning eventually. And maybe your friend gets a little insulted because you don’t believe him, and your second friend is either getting ready to embellish the rainstorm story with all sorts of incidents that never happened at all, and frankly maybe she wasn’t even caught in a rainstorm.
The great writer Vladimir Nabokov wrote that the word reality is one of those words that doesn’t make any sense unless it has scare quote marks around it, the idea being that one person’s reality is another person’s extended contrivance. Just let a born-again Christian and an agnostic talk about the “reality” of God for a while.
I call this podcast False Stories even though many of the details in all three of them so far actually happened. But they are and will be stories which pivot from a single truth or a single detail, and then become surreal or ridiculous, and that surreal or ridiculous twist acts like a seasoning that overwhelms the whole dish and makes it false. But I will tell some stories, if you keep listening, that are the absolute truth, and here of course we run up against that other factor that makes even the “truest” story false. Everything is soaked in an individual perspective, to false memory, to misinterpreted so-called “facts,” and so on. This is why biography, autobiography, and memoir are so notoriously hard to write or tell. At some point your own ignorance is going to betray your pure intentions, or you’re going to bump up against an incident that is open to several interpretations, depending on who you ask, depending on what proportion of the facts you have, and depending on how much time has passed since it happened.
Art, and I mostly mean some kind of writing here, is different from real life, in the sense that, to make a broad and therefore inaccurate generalization, the closer a written piece (fiction, a play, a song) is to the exact facts of what happened—what really happened, as the overconfident artist might say—the more it risks not succeeding as a piece of art. Let me try to explain.
First, I can already think of examples of non-written art that contradict this. Photographers take pictures of reality that are works of art. Some painters, and some films, are hyper-realistic, but also successful art works as well. The examples that came to me recently were two songs, by very different singers, and in two very different genres. I just happen recently to be obsessively replaying one of them, and just to hear a snippet of the other one when I watched part of a video on YouTube.
Let’s take the one I’ve listened to scores of times just in the last few weeks, and is one of the signature songs of one of my favourite bands: “Burning Down the House” by the Talking Heads, with lead singer David Byrne. I actually don’t listen to much music, and so I don’t have that comprehensive knowledge and experience of that art form that make me feel fully confident in my assessments. But there are some songs that just knock me over with their quality, and some bands that consistently produce great songs. I’ll play the first few minutes of “Burning Down the House” as it was performed in the documentary called Stop Making Sense, directed by Jonathan Demme in 1984. Okay, here goes:
[audio clip]
And in case you didn’t catch the lyrics, here they are, right after David Byrne cheekily says lightly before the song proper starts, “Who got a match?”:
Aah, watch out
You might get what you’re after
Cool, babies
Strange, but not a stranger
I’m an ordinary guy
Burnin’ down the house
–
Hold tight
Wait till the party’s over
Hold tight
We’re in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way
Burnin’ down the house
–
Here’s your ticket, pack your bags
Time for jumpin’ overboard
Transportation is here
Close enough, but not too far
Maybe you know where you are
Fightin’ fire with fire, ahh
It’s a bit of a mystery of a song. At least for me, if you’re looking for a straightforward story line, or even what some things mean and why they are combined with other things, you’re unlikely to come away satisfied that you’ve figured it all out. However, you are pretty likely to come away satisfied in general. The song sounds excellent. The musicality of many songs by the Talking Heads is often one of their best assets. And as for the lyrics, the words work like words do in poetry or in fiction at the highest level. Every syllable is carefully chosen and not only is there any need to explain what everything means, but you get the feeling that doing so is actively avoided.
That’s to be contrasted with the other song that I just heard a snippet from this week, when I watched as much of Donald Trump’s performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner as I could (a couple of minutes, even less than I could hold out for the Melania documentary). Before Trump begins his remarks (over an hour BTW), the country singer Lee Greenwood sings what has also become his signature song I suppose. The title, like the rest of the song, contains no nuance and leaves no mysteries to figure out. Here’s a bit from near the beginning of “God Bless the U.S.A.”:
[audio clip]
And in case you didn’t catch those lyrics, they are:
And I’m proud to be an American
Where at least I know I’m free
And I won’t forget the men who died
Who gave that right to me
And I gladly stand up next to you
And defend her still today
’Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land
God Bless the USA
I don’t think there’s much to explain here. The words literally, and literally, speak for themselves.
Coincidentally, both the songs date from the mid-1980s. What I take away from juxtaposing them like this, and with the caveat of course that tastes differ, is that it’s not enough to just tell a story fully clearly and explicitly and expect to get something artistic from it. The Greenwood songs stays solidly planted on the ground. You can walk around it and view it from all sides, and just nod at every turn that you understand exactly what he means.
I look at the Talking Heads song the other way. It’s a diametric opposite. If you put on a lab coat and examine it the way a scientist might, then there are some major hindrances to understanding the story, some major holes in the narrative. You get a sense of what’s going on but you also get a sense that it doesn’t matter, if I can put it that categorically.
So what does all this have to do with stories both true and false? The main conclusion I come to is that if your main goal is absolute clarity, a low tolerance for ambiguity, and an unwillingness or an inability to question and examine motives and actions, then the result will be some pretty poor stuff. The better storytellers embrace the missing pieces and the cloudy pieces, and juggle them in the air to produce joy, to put on a show.
