The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Snares of Grace

What attracts us to a certain kind of life? To a place? To another person? Obviously it is not the bare facts of their existence. Our emotional calculus is subjective. We select the facts that matter to us (or perhaps they are selected for us). We weave these facts into stories to which we then mysteriously become committed. Our lives take on a direction, spiritually as well as geographically. We become devoted to a cause, to something that we come to consider part of ourselves. We fall in love.

Religious people call this process being touched by grace. And certainly it feels as if one has been affected by an alien presence, something entirely outside of oneself. And there is some truth in this feeling because the stories we concoct are never ours alone. No story rises up without a history like Venus from the sea. All stories are to some extent ‘already there’ waiting to be heard and then retold with the emotion we have attached to them.

Some stories are attractive because they are familiar. But others are compelling because they are so different from any we have heard before. The key difference need not be in the story itself but in the unstated presumptions about what is important in life, about what should be noticed, even about what it means to be human. These are the stories that provoke ‘conversion,’ that is to say, the stepping beyond the normal, the conventional, the expected.

Conversion implies a loss of oneself, or at least the self one has been. The new self is only incipient in the stories in which one has enmeshed oneself. It emerges fully only through the unique re-telling of these stories. Vargas-Llosa understands the process: “The sort of decision arrived at by saints and madmen is not revealed to others. It is forged little by little, in the folds of the spirit, tangential to reason, shielded from indiscreet eyes, not seeking the approval of others—who would never grant it—until it is at last put into practice.”

If the story and the speaker of the story are very good, important things make sense, things like the origins of suffering and disappointment and the meaning of the feelings of isolation and loss. The best stories are those that include other stories (those 0f other animals as well as humans). And the most inclusive story has incredible value: “Whoever knows all the stories has wisdom.” At this point the story becomes a religion and the storyteller a prophet.* And the world changes, at least for a time. If the story is good enough for those who hear it, it can unify them against stories (and religions) from elsewhere that have nothing to do with their own experience.

*Several people have been in touch to ask how stories include one another. Vargas-Llosa demonstrates how explicitly in his alternate chapters on the tales of the hablador. His stories start out modestly about a single tribe and their origins and responsibilities. The stories gradually expand to include all the ‘men who walk’ in the forests below the Great Gorge of the River. They then extend further up into the Andes to incorporate Inca and other mountain traditions, including those of the Sky gods. Ultimately the stories extend to a re-telling of Judaic persecution and diaspora and of Christian accounts of the birth and death of Jesus. There is even an intriguing digression into the nature of language and its dangers that is worthy of Wittgenstein (or the Kabbalah). The hablador forgets nothing and ensures everything fits in a coherent narrative whole. This syncretistic innovation is its strength. The story rejects nothing; yet it insists on nothing. It’s elements are “what I have been told.” It would presumably continue to grow as it encounters new elements, at least as long as the people of the hablador continue to exist.

Postscript: As yet there has been no story told that is compelling enough to stop the exploitation of the Amazonian jungle or its inhabitants more than a half century after the events in The Storyteller. A more powerful religion is apparently required: https://apple.news/A9-lWNXAqRVyJeYFIH...

View all my reviews