Stories and why we need them - Philip Pullman

15^th October 2008

A couple of years ago, at the launch of the Youthhealthtalk website, I spoke about why we enjoy stories, and what sort of stories we find useful or entertaining, and what purposes story serves in our lives.

I won’t repeat now everything I said then. Instead I want to focus on just one aspect of stories and storytelling, which is authenticity.

Because we value authenticity highly. It’s a quality we think is very important in a narrative – a travel book or a work of journalism especially: we want to know that the author really did go to Mongolia, that he really did live with the Indians on the banks of the Amazon, that she really did interview Colonel Gaddafi and wasn’t just making it up, and so on.

Even a narrative that’s obviously fictional, science fiction or fantasy, seems more valuable to us, more meaningful, if there’s something in it we can refer to reality – something we can check against what we know to be facts. We may not know all that much about quantum physics, but if what little we do know isn’t contradicted by the story, if the writer doesn’t say something obviously wrong and silly, if the background feels solid to us and the scenery doesn’t wobble, we trust the story just a little more. And even a story as obviously fantastical as Wagner’s Ring keeps us enthralled and involved because of the human truthfulness in what his gods and giants and dwarves are doing. It feels true to us that people would behave like that; it’s psychologically persuasive; it’s authentic about human beings.

In recent years there’s been a spate of so-called misery memoirs – you know the sort of thing: “I was kept in a coal-scuttle for fourteen years and only allowed out for my crazy mother to do evil things to me” – which depend for their effectiveness on our believing that they’re true, this really happened, while we were living our comfortable and blameless lives this poor chap, only in the next town, was undergoing these hideous experiences in a street just like ours. Which accounts for the anger when readers find out, as they did recently in America with one such book, that it wasn’t really true, that it was really a novel, that he’d made it all up. We feel cheated and duped; we’ve trusted something that turned out to be false.

Which brings me, of course, to the work of this website. Those who’ve known it as DIPEx know already what authenticity sounds like. The experience of serious illness, or of a chronic condition of discomfort or pain, is valuable to us for all the reasons we value authenticity elsewhere. We can trust it; it tells us something we wouldn’t know otherwise; someone has gone to a place where we haven’t been, or where we might be going, and has come back to tell us about it. So their testimony, their witness, their stories, are uniquely valuable. When they say “It was painful, it was difficult, it was a long time before I began to feel better,” we know they’re not dissembling; and when they say “The treatment is worth staying with, because it certainly worked in the end. I feel better, I can move freely, I don’t have that pain all the time,” we know they’re not trying to sell us something, we know they’re telling the truth.

For me, the most interesting as well as the most encouraging aspect of this website and its work is the sense it gives me that we human beings are connected to one another by invisible bands of sympathy and understanding and experience. When we listen to someone and take their account on trust, we do take a risk; they might be fooling us. They might be in it for profit, or for self-aggrandisement. But on the whole, when we take things seriously, we tell the truth, and in doing do we depend on a particular relationship we have with everybody else. We reveal ourselves when we trust our experiences to others: and they trust us, in turn, to tell the truth about them. It’s why we feel authenticity to be so valuable and important, and why the breakdown of it, the sense that we’ve been duped, is so upsetting.

Some years ago Richard Titmuss published a famous book on the subject of blood donation, which he called The Gift Relationship. It showed how a non-market system, based on altruism, based on giving blood for nothing, worked better than one based on profit. We might say that the interviews on this website, the whole business of offering your experience to other people, is a similar sort of enterprise. People offer their experiences as they offer blood – freely, because it’s a good thing to do, because on the whole altruism is a true human characteristic. This is a gift relationship too, one marked by authenticity and truth: we could call it the authenticity relationship. And it will certainly be – it certainly is already – similarly valuable.

So I salute everyone involved in this, from Ann McPherson and her team, to the designers of the website, to the donors who’ve supported the project, to the very important people who have decided to share their experiences with anyone who needs them, to tell their stories and offer the knowledge they’ve gained, to take us with them in imagination and sympathy. All of them deserve our thanks and our praise, and all the admiration and gratitude that ought to go to those who tell true stories.

Philip Pullman is the author of ‘His Dark Materials’, Part One of which – ‘Northern Lights’ – was recently made into the film ‘The Golden Compass’.