We humans are—notoriously—storytelling animals. But what if we are simply too human to understand that stories are also alive and living alongside us? The challenge lies in expanding our notion of ‘living’ to encompass a fuller range of biological possibilities. And, once we have done that, we can understand more fully how stories help and harm us. That is—in a nutshell—the argument of Joel Christensen’s book.
I read most of Storylife as I sat in the shade of a community garden, sprinklers humming, nursing my allotments through a particularly brutal Canberra summer. I’m inclined to walk home and announce “I grew these tomatoes!”. But this is egoistic chauvinism, and factually inaccurate. I did nothing of the sort. The tomatoes grew themselves; a seed drew in moisture and nutrients and, through mitosis and aided by growth hormones, photosynthesis, and the microbiome of its rhizosphere, it reproduced itself within new fruit. My role was to tend the ecosystem: to be friends with people who save seeds locally; to keep the community garden going; to spread compost and mulch; to spot and squash harlequin bugs; to prune out yellowing leaves; to locate sprinklers strategically when the rains refuse to come. And then, like the parasite I now realise myself to be, I pluck the seed-filled fruit as they come ripe and bear them proudly home.
This self-indulgent paragraph has a serious point: as Christensen argues, when we exchange one set of conceptual analogies for another, we shift our understanding both of our role in things, and of what those things do to—and for, and through—us. We humans naturally attribute creativity to deliberative, human-like agency. We see a watch and look for the watchmaker; we read a poem and imagine the poet; we hear a story and wonder about the storyteller’s purpose. But ‘Homer’ already challenges the model of the Muse-inspired author-god who brings the text into existence ex nihilo. Christensen’s argument transcends merely placing Homer within the oral tradition. Because, he argues, human cognition prefers patterns of deliberate design and teleological processes, we struggle to properly conceptualise complex aggregative developments through shifting contexts; here his analogy is the symphony, in which it is the listener’s time and attention that gives music meaning (e.g. p. 16). The solution is not simply to shift agency in meaning-making from creator to audience; it is to understand creative practice as happening within an ecosystem in which agency takes many forms, not all of them human-like, and evolution occurs through serendipity and happenstance. So, we storytellers (and story-listeners) are in an ecological relationship with stories, and those stories are living organisms capable of enacting change on the things—the human organisms and the environments they build—that they encounter.
Christensen’s argument for understanding stories through analogies to living organisms proceeds through five chapters, each of which analogises a different biological phenomenon. The chapters move cumulatively from examining the details of Homeric diction and style to reflecting on the bigger picture. Homeric epic is the testing ground for these ideas not just because it typifies the author-less creation that produces further storytelling, but because the two poems ‘take the essential features of narrative and reweave them into sophisticated ruminations on narrative’s power and “problem sets” about how it works in the world’ (p. 192).
Chapter one compares Homeric language to the ‘scripts’ of DNA. Words undergo morphological evolution; and they possess epigenetic potential such that customary formulaic phrases are capable of conveying new meanings in response to shifting narrative environments. Chapter two compares the patterns we observe in Homeric poetry—ring compositions and type scenes—to geometrical patterns found in nature, like tree rings and the scaled relationships between single-celled organisms and complex life forms. Christensen argues that such repetitions and variations should lead us not to think of the deliberative work of a designer, but rather to appreciate the way that the poetic language itself builds complexity and capacity for nuance by the very fact of its diachronic persistence and its myriad interactions with its narrative environment.
Chapter three uses observed examples of convergent and parallel evolution to tackle ‘universal’ story motifs. Without denying that comparable stories and narrative themes do emerge repeatedly within similar environments ‘because of the basic parameters of human life’ (p. 98), Christensen challenges the overemphasis of their similarities. Searching for ‘monomyths’ loses sight of both specific narrative complexities\and the distinctiveness of the environments that produce them. So, ‘[a]ctual experiences of narrative … are bound culturally by the forms they take structurally and the purposes they serve in context … When [Joseph] Campbell (or others) selects narrative details from a poem or story to align it with patterns found elsewhere, he leaves behind the very traits that make that story itself and which allow it to make sense in its cultural environment’ (pp. 100-1).
Chapter four deepens this treatment of contextual significance. It introduces the analogy of the virus. These are parasitic beings without inherent moral character whose survival is bound up in the survival of their hosts, on whom they effect both harms and (albeit less frequently) benefits. Christensen’s virus is the Homeric discourse of kleos, the eternal heroic fame that, in Christensen’s reading, provokes notable anxiety. Homeric heroes discuss and manipulate kleos to their own purposes, but are ever mindful that they cannot entirely control their future reputations. The promises of wide kleos bring threat and consolation in turn. The irony is of course that these conversations happen within the bounds of the very mechanism—epic—through which they secure ‘undying kleos’. Kleos transforms lives into stories; the reward of positive kleos—glory—makes death worthwhile. Christensen points out that this discourse is a snapshot of a parasite at a particular point in its virality. The anxiety of Homeric heroes about kleos’ unpredictability and its high personal cost is absent from the later claims of epinician poets and memorial epigraphs to guarantee the glory of the dead. The viral rhetoric of kleos always favours the survival of the superorganism over the immediate interests of the individual. Without the context of Homeric anxiety and ambiguity, the simplified promise of glory is propagandistic persuasion.
Chapter five takes this theme further, using symbiosis to explore the capacities of metonymic allusions to grow in new ways and express different potentials as their environments shift. Here the microbe analogy becomes ever more concrete: if we understand ourselves as stories’ hosts (and not simply their creators), we need to recognise that this symbiotic relationship, like our interdependence with other species and the natural world, has been crucial to our past evolution and is crucial to our future flourishing. Like viruses, stories have no inherent morality; it is the nature of our relationships with them that causes their effects to be beneficial or harmful. As we have come to expect from Christensen, we get astute readings of both epics that cut across the grain. The virus of the Odyssey is the practice of vengeance, a narrative arc that at first articulates the righting of wrongs but soon descends into a spiral of continuous destruction resolvable only in a storyworld capable of producing a deus ex machina who can draw down the curtain on the scene. The virus of the Iliad is the expectation of compensatory kleos, but again Christensen shows that this is less a celebration of the heroic ideal than is often expected. The crucial point is that Homeric epic supplies the vaccination as it spreads the virus: ‘It exposes its audiences to heroic myth, attempts to provide a critique to induce a response against it, and sets up frameworks for surviving the story and developing alternatives’ (p.165). Christensen emphasises, as often, the damage inflicted by traditional heroism, and the ambivalence that ancient communities did show towards this model of aristeia. Yet, the existence of a vaccine does not equal a vaccinated population: ‘Two problems confront such a strategy of inoculation: not enough audience members absorb and re-create the critique, and epic narrative continues to replicate the basic elements of the narrative it tries to change’ (p. 165). In contexts where those critiques remain inactivated, the master narrative of a hero, physically impressive, youthful, violent, privileged, entitled, and desirous of kleos, spreads unchecked through its host. This is the danger of stories. Internalised uncritically, a script for human aspiration becomes of-a-piece with reality itself. As Christensen points out, we cannot easily distinguish the perverse worldview of school shooters in the USA from an overinvestment in a cartoonish image of Homeric heroics. Rigid adherence to such a narrow narrative paradigm ‘leave[s] little room for the mundane challenges of life, for navigating the world when we are not the strongest or fastest, for aging, raising children, or living alongside imperfect others’ (p. 177).
The very idea of offering agency to stories and then observing their interactions with their environments might suggest a mechanical vision of storytelling, one in which we storytellers and audiences are stripped of both power and responsibility. This is far from Christensen’s mission. We too often lionize storytelling as denotative of our humanity while simultaneously ignoring the very real harms that our collective need for narrative produces. We ignore the very real consequences of stories. Our responsibility begins and ends with our power over ourselves; ‘imagining that narrative is alive puts us in a position to be better stewards of the lives we live alongside it’ (p. 180). We are, in short, being asked to be better gardeners in our narrative ecosystems. Christensen ends with a call to take the power of stories seriously, to create within us a reservoir of immunity by teaching them in their fullest, most dangerous capacities. We need, in short, to bathe ourselves in narrative plurality, complexity, and diversity; to find the unanticipated in the canonical; and to be judicious. We need to spend more time with stories that surprise and defy us: ‘Narratives with open ends that challenge how we see the world and provide problems instead of paradigms’ (p. 191).
Storylife is a compelling set of observations born out of long engagement with Homer, deep consideration of the very idea of human storytelling, and a palpable unease with what is too often blindly ignored. It does not shy away from technical details of language and meter and assumes a basic familiarity with grammatical concepts. What makes it accessible is its commitment to a set of conceptual frameworks which are explained with lucidity and care. This is not a book to be quibbled with; it is an experiment in thinking differently about some very old topics. Reading Storylife is a pleasurable treat. It is fresh, intelligent, surprising, and unpretentious.