The Stories We Tell and the Future We Enter
The power of our perception of what is happening in our lives
This piece originally ran in August 2023.
Near the end of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers, as Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee prepare to enter a far more dangerous phase of their quest, the two stop and reflect on what is happening to them.
“I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” asks Sam. He speculates that they might be in a story important enough to be written down. Less optimistic, Frodo speculates that what they are enduring is so awful that even if it were written down readers might be scared off.
Recognizing a story requires being able to see the past not as a jumble of events but rather as something ordered. English professor and writer Norman Maclean believed that sometimes a story was something one had “to find” in the past. When Maclean could see experience as a story, he recognized tension, a climax to the tension, and resolution. Drawing on the work of psychologist Dan McAdams, Susan Cain wrote in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking that people’s stories of their lives include “beginnings, conflicts, turning points, and endings.” Finding a story also means being able to see the story’s genre. When he wrote his history of the 1949 wildfire in Mann Gulch, Montana, Maclean was able to cast it as a tragedy.
Maclean thought the past only occurred in the form of a story in certain cases. I think we can always order the past into a story – though some parts of the past may be easier to turn into great literature, which may be what Maclean meant.
Ordering the past into story like Sam, Frodo, and Maclean is something we need to do with great care because the point at which we turn the past into story is one of the places where it gains great power for good or ill.
The type of story we think we are in influences the future. Recognizing this, George Orwell in 1984 gave the ruling party of Oceania the slogan “Who controls the past controls the future.” What people believe has happened in the past affects what people are willing to do. This is even true when people’s views of the past are not shaped by totalitarians. In Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, historian David M. Kennedy wrote that one of the fuel sources for American isolationism in the 1930s was the first generation of histories of the First World War, which characterized American involvement as unnecessary, the product of British lies, President Woodrow Wilson’s demanding morality, and the government’s indulgence of bankers and weapons makers. And the fate of individuals has much to do with the stories they believe they are living out. Historian Forrest McDonald noted in Recovering the Past: A Historian’s Memoir that many eighteenth-century leaders deliberately lived as if they were characters in a story other than their own. Choosing to play admirable people who fit their personality and staying in character allowed them became like that character. By living as if he was the sort of person who was the hero in a great story, George Washington “ultimately transformed himself into a man of almost extrahuman virtue.” Again drawing on McAdams, Cain wrote that when we “write our life stories. . . . the way we characterize our past setbacks profoundly influences how satisfied we are with our current lives. Unhappy people tend to see setbacks as contaminants that ruined an otherwise good thing . . . , while generative adults see them as blessings in disguise.”
An example of how a negative impression of one’s story can poison a life comes from the account in Genesis of Jacob and his favorite son, Joseph. As far as Jacob knew, Joseph was dead. Another son was a hostage in Egypt. His family faced starvation from famine, but the Egyptians would only trade them grain if Benjamin, Jacob’s favorite remaining son, accompanied his brothers on their next visit. Summing up his life story, Jacob exclaimed, “Everything is against me!” (42:36, NIV). Guided by such a dark view of his story, he refused to take a risk and put off sending Benjamin with his brothers to Egypt until it was almost too late.
Since our perception of the stories we are living in makes such a big difference, we must determine and tell them carefully. Above all, we have to tell the truth about them. Truth-telling is not only virtuous but also beneficial. Part of telling the truth is getting the facts right. Facts can be hard to track down, but they are either true or false. Stories must also properly interpret the past. Interpretations are the arguments and plots we use to give shape to the facts. For example, in “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” historian William Cronon observed that some historians frame the Great Plains Dust Bowl of the 1930s as a story of human conquest of hostile nature, while others read it as a story of human destruction of well-functioning nature. Unlike facts, interpretations are rarely if ever fully true or false but do vary in their reliability. Cronon said that this latter feature of stories could be evaluated on the amount of evidence for it, its fit with scientific knowledge, and its acceptance by other historians. In telling their own stories, individuals might adapt this by considering whether their stories are based on real examples from their past, fit what they know about the nature of reality, and are endorsed by people they trust.
How we tell stories about the past varies depending on whether we are working as professional historians or examining our own lives. Historians’ responsibility is above all to understand the past. They must use the available sources to find out as much as they can of what happened in the matter under consideration then find an interpretation that best fits what happened. Recognition that understanding of the past influences the present should lead them to take their work seriously but should not be their primary concern. It is almost impossible for historians not to have their view of the past colored by their political or religious views, but shaping the present to conform to them should not be their aim. Once it is, they are no longer doing history. Historians who work this way might win popularity, but they are also vulnerable. The honest revisionist can come along and expose them.
By contrast, when we consider our own stories we are mainly concerned with action. Our ultimate purpose in reflecting on our lives is not advancing the state of knowledge about them. Above all, we want to use to use our stories as means of living virtuously, serving others, and finding satisfaction. Still, the concern with action does not lift the responsibility to tell the truth. When we reflect on our pasts, we must not make them out to have been darker or more ideal than they were. As Susan Cain pointed out, stories that are more negative than reality can corrupt our present and future. On the other hand, stories’ power to help us comes from allowing us to make peace with what actually happened so that we can live in line with reality. Therefore, stories cannot give birth to any future we choose. We cannot make ourselves successful in the future by lying to ourselves that we were popular elite athletes back in high school.
Although we, like historians, ought to seek the facts and plausible interpretations when we tell our stories, we have more latitude for our interpretations. That is because when we look at our own lives, we are less certain than the historian about what the story is. Although it is uncertain what the final meaning of historical events will be in light of the future, our lives are like half-finished historical events. Discovering our stories is like trying to write a history of the American Revolution in 1778. We can interpret some of what has happened, but we can also make decisions that will affect how it all plays out. This is the position of Frodo and Sam. Frodo says that readers or listeners “may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know.” And since the story’s outcome is not only uncertain but also still in our hands, the decisions we make about how to interpret the story can determine whether the interpretation proves correct. Still drawing on McAdams, Cain argued that people ought to adopt “a redemptive life story” because it allows our pasts to flower in the future. These are the life stories in which we interpret the past, even failures and disappointment, as beneficial.
Unlike his father, Joseph was able to tell a redemptive story of his life. His eleven brothers hated him because he was their father’s favorite and because he was so aloof to family dynamics that he told them about dreams in which he was their superior. When they got a chance, they sold him into slavery in Egypt. There, Joseph began gaining his master’s esteem – until his master’s wife falsely accused him of sexual assault, which got him thrown into prison. Joseph correctly interpreted the dreams of two of his fellow prisoners, one of whom was wine-taster for the Pharaoh, the ruler of the land – but the wine-taster forgot about Joseph. At this point, Joseph might have interpreted his life as a story of how his irredeemable failures ruined him: “If I had not been so clumsy and arrogant around my brothers, my life would not have ended up this way.” Or he might have interpreted his life as a victimization story: “If my brothers, my owner, my owner’s wife, the wine-taster, and my indulgent father had not done me wrong, everything would be different.” But Joseph seems to have put himself in a redemptive story at this low point. And then, suddenly, he experienced a meteoritic rise. Pharaoh had terrible dreams that no one could interpret, the wine-taster finally remembered Joseph, Pharaoh summoned him, Joseph interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams, and Pharaoh rewarded him by making him second-in-command of the land, a position that allowed Joseph to save Egypt and even his brothers and his father from famine. At the end of it all, he told his brothers what he thought the story was: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (50:20, ESV). The reason that Joseph was able to act decisively and graciously when his opportunity came was likely that he interpreted his life’s story in a hopeful yet sound fashion when everything seemed against him.