Fear Of Story
We fear what we feel.
The denouement in The Wonder, the majestic film version of Emma Donohue’s novel, is the flicker of a moment when Florence Pugh’s young nurse, Lib Wright, panics, thinking she may have killed the child, eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell, she was so desperate to save.
Has she gone too far? Has she used the power of storytelling against Anna, rather than for her?
The nurse used story to initiate a healing psychological transformation that she hoped would deliver the young girl into living a new life, a new identity and in so doing cause her to embrace the future. The nurse literally changed the narrative and the girl, Anna, was reborn.
But that moment of fear when Lib is not sure if the story worked is really at the heart of how story works. We have a fear of story and a need to explain it, rather than let the feelings that emanate from the story radiate our bodies and ourselves. We know a story works when it stiffens the spine, causes fingers of electricity to crawl across our backs and churns and clenches the gut - the enteric nervous system, the second brain, where feeling forms and confuses the mind.
We fear story because it makes us feel.
In November, 2020, upon the launch of a new book of poetry, Dearly, Margaret Atwood was challenged on CBC radio to explain how a poem could transmit an idea in a few lines.
“Well, I think that's kind of a misconception,” she retorted in her take no prisoners reply. “We used to be taught poetry that way in high school, that the poet had taken this idea and stuffed it into this sonnet. Which just made you think, "Well, why did they bother? If it was an idea, why couldn't they just blurt it out? Why does it have to rhyme?"
How does she think about poetry?
“It's the experience of the poem itself, so you're following somebody's thought process.” Atwood clarified.
Similarly, it’s the experience of the story itself. And feelings captured in us remain for a long time. Which is perhaps why we mistrust the power of story. We can’t control it. It’s too powerful to mess with and we just don’t understand it. Yet, we crave to tell each other story after story. In fact, it is really the only way we truly communicate.
The Wonder is a miracle of layers upon layers of story – each of them transformative in their way. Lib is trapped in her own addictive escape from her own past – her infant daughter’s death haunts her. Her time as a nurse in Crimea, trying to give comfort to the broken dying soldiers haunts her. Her scientific training to make and record observations and her drive to get at the empirical truth haunts her.
The remote Irish community in 1858, ten years after the famine, seeks its own miracle. A ‘fasting girl’, who through the power of God requires no food to thrive. This is a fundamental story of Irish Catholic aestheticism. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, in her book Fasting Girls, describes how medieval women fasted to become more holy, as they were “preoccupied by noneating because food practices provided a basic way to express religious ideals of suffering and service to their fellow creatures.”
We see this religious ritual throughout the world today. Just as Christ went into the wilderness for 40 days, we seek similar spiritual awakenings through Ramadan and Orthodox Christian fasting days. But in the case of the Irish Fasting Girls, these young women became a phenomenon that attracted religious tourists and pilgrims seeking healing and put the town on the map. This “miracle” is something the local committee of men is too keen to verify. They have their own confirmation bias to prove Anna’s holiness. For poor families, it was a way to gain notoriety, even remuneration. There was lot invested in proving it was a mystery. At such a young age, were they being used? Did they know what they were doing? Was this an early form of anorexia where the girls were seeking approval, or just validation of their existence?
Lib Wright wanted nothing do with this medieval narrative. There must be a scientific explanation, as she jots down another observation in her notebook, and there is, but the local committee of men don’t want to hear it. They want the miracle. They’ve prayed for the miracle. This disbelief of science in favour of a mystical or conspiratorial rationale is redolent of our current pandemic conflicts.
At first glance, Emma Donoghue wrote her book to expiate her fascination with the Irish fasting girls – something she had pondered for two decades. Fact-based historical fiction, she calls it - a glorious term that highlights how we find the truth in fiction. But in the end, the story strikes a deep chord about how one’s own identify is created by story and is a story that it can also be changed by a story.
Only when the story elicits emotion is it memorable. Is this why we so mistrust story in our work lives? We are fearing emotion.
We were recently engaged to conduct a story-branding exercise for a service company. We gathered stories from the partners, clients, and employees. We looked for the confluence of thought in these stories, not to explain them, but to draw them together, tied under a headline that connected them and could stand at the masthead of every story.
The firm seemed puzzled when faced with hearing their own voices read back to them. It was terrifying. It was as if their inner secret lives had suddenly been shunted naked into the city square. They weren’t, but it felt that way to them. Feeling a little like Lib Wright, no one believed us.
Or did they so fear the narrative being played back to them that it couldn’t be right?
They walked away from the story of themselves and so left the room where transformation would have guided them on a new path. They sought refuge in their old story which while befuddled, was comfortable.
We know that story works when a risk is taken, when the fear of going wrong visits us. It doesn’t work unless you have the same flicker of panic that crossed Lib’s face. That’s what makes it unforgettable. A risk must be taken to call out the spirits of feeling. The riskier the story; the more impact it has.
It’s an irony for all businesses; they thrive on risk to start, then avoid risk to protect what they have gained. In the end, they apply a tourniquet to the life blood that created them. That’s precisely the moment when they need to embrace a profound new story, one that changes the narrative and redefines them, just as Lib did with Anna.
The transformative power of story requires facing the fear of the feelings that the story will deliver. Story helps us invent the future. Embracing story puts us on the path to a healing journey, which connotes a new identity, and a new way to think and act.