In Ursula K Le Guin’s hugely under-appreciated novel The Telling, the protagonist, Sutty, spends time on a planet where the ancient culture of storytelling has been banned by a violently oppressive state Government. The Corporation, as they are known, put out slogans like “pure science destroys corruption” and insists that people are to be called “producer-consumers”.
Spoilers: it’s a metaphor.
Sutty is sent to observe the people, but finds herself mixed up with the rebellion, who’s only act of resistance is to gather together and tell stories.
In her struggle to understand why people would risk their lives to tell stories that seem to have no point, one of the rebels says to her, “Animals have no language. They have their nature. You see? They know the way, they know where to go and how to go, following their nature. But we’re animals with no nature. We have to talk about how to go and what to do, think about it, study it, learn it. If nobody teaches us the words, the thoughts, we stay ignorant. If nobody shows a little child, two, three years old, how to look for the way, the signs of the path, the landmarks, then it gets lost on the mountain, doesn’t it? And dies in the night, in the cold.”
Spoilers: we’ve moved well beyond metaphor. We have gone right round the metaphor circle here to just straight up direct truth.
Imagine this crackpot theory of mine: when we got our big brains a few million years ago, we unwittingly engaged in a trade off. A kind of evolutionary apple and snake scenario, if you will.
We got human intelligence, reason, logic, science, all those wonderful things. But we lost our animal instinct, the ability to just know how to exist. In exchange, we gained phantasms in our minds, the ability to imagine things that aren’t there – possible futures, possible pasts, possible nows.
We got stories.
A bridge between the world and us.
The mechanism by which we understand all that we are and all we should do.
That is what the Resistance is explaining to Sutty: that our stories are us as much as the soil is the Earth.
When, at Writers’ HQ, we say that stories are resistance, that stories are powerful, that stories are medicine, we mean it figuratively because it’s a pretty and motivating thing to say, but we also mean it literally.
We are entirely defined by the stories we share.
Not just the big blockbuster movies or bestselling books. But the self-published books that sell 30 copies, the niche indie lit mags, the flash fic, fan fic, the stories jotted on a scrap of paper and hidden at the bottom of a box in the attic, the scary local myths shared by overzealous teenagers, the fairy tales we tell to soothe our young children, the urban legends we warn each other with, the yarns we weave at the end of the day around the dining table, the family stories we pass down from mouth to ear to heart.
These are our life blood.
Our greatest guide, defence and weapon.
This is all of us.
This is important.
Go write.
Sarah & Team WHQ
I guess embracing stories is one way of embracing ourselves as a species, and reading or writing stories is one way (perhaps the best way) of honouring our species. These days we’re very aware of the awful evil we can do in the world or – worse – condone. Stories insistantly show what else we can do and who else we can be. Le Guin knows our ultimate subjugation as a species is the banning or burning of our stories. It’s one possible future. We’re literally here on this site to lend our blood, guts, reading and writing to another.