Storythinking with Dan & Tracy (Ch 4)
Why Our Schools Teach Logic, Not Story
Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence, Angus Fletcher, 2023
Table of Contents (evolving)
Chapter 1 (hosted by Dan)
Chapter 2 (hosted by Tracy)
Chapter 3 (hosted by Dan)
Chapter 4 (this post)
The chapter opens with Fletcher recounting the face-off in 2010 between the STEM-focused Common Core educators and a “miniscule contrarian faction,” the remnants of the “Chicago School,” when the Common Core K-12 curriculum was launched. (48) Fletcher reminisces about the similarity of this launch with the momentous debate in 1880s England about curriculum reform in the face of British imperialism: “how to train young minds to maintain the empire’s wealth and influence.” (47) From the 1990s, America had won its own “imperial” battle against the Soviet Union. England’s early version of the debate had pitted the classicist Matthew Arnold against the practical Baconian scientist Thomas Huxley — and Huxley won. Britain’s education system moved to a STEM focus, just as the CC would do 130 years later, except the new debate was never about returning to the classics. The problem, says Fletcher, was what was done to the (few) stories left in the curriculum. They weren’t treated as narratives anymore — but rather as “Language Arts” — and storythinking was lost. The last defenders of narrative were the remnants of the Chicago School.
Dan here! One of the things that strikes me about this Common Core anecdote is that I think this era of US Ed policy focused a lot on assessment. It's much easier to create objective tests around data and logic than around narrativity. There were probably also some ideas buried in there about the apparent superiority of objectivity over subjectivity.
Speaking of narrative, the comparison of the two very interesting characters Matthew Arnold and T.H. Huxley could have gone on a bit longer.
And then the Chicago School in the 1930s. Robert Hutchins! And on into the Great Books tradition!
The antagonist in Fletcher’s story is I.A. Richards, who
provided the justification for the Core’s decision to opt for “Language” over “Narrative,” a justification he’d developed by turning to logic, or to be precise, to the subfield of logic known as semiotics.
Semiotics is the application of symbolic logic to language. (49)
It had been invented by Aristotle way back in his Organon texts and had since grown into a vast methodology that treated texts as equation-like “sets of propositions” that would yield “truth statements that reveal what texts are claiming, or more colloquially, what the words mean.”
After identifying a story’s key symbols, semiotics uses interpretation to transform those symbols into arguments, themes, allegories, motifs, and other propositional forms of meaning. (50)
Narratives, stories, are converted into symbolic meanings.
The assumption underlying this interpretive movement turns out to have a long pedigree, too, as long as symbolic logic’s own, going back to early Christian theology (says Fletcher), and continuing all the way forward through 19th century thinkers (de Saussure, C.S. Pierce), to I.A. Richards in the 20th c.1 The last straw of narrative had been “character criticism,” and Richards sought to purge it. Character criticism had previously prompted theater audiences and novel readers, German Romantics and English Victorians, “to ask why dramatic characters acted as they did” and to “minutely anatomize the doings of Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, and other literary persons.” (52)
Dan: The "diligent friars" wielding syllogisms against Beowulf and the classics to turn them into moral allegories was probably also motivated by an effort to "Christianize" the pagan works as well, which was arguably another simplification that damaged the meanings and richness of the originals.
Character Criticism sounds like what I tend to do. I'm always asking myself whether I believe in a character's motivation. I think that's one of the most important elements of a story. I think I even apply that attitude to history.
Unfortunately, wild speculations by character critics about motives pushed the method into disrepute. Richards aimed to show “the intractable problem of narrative” and effect its purge, without destroying the viability of literary studies altogether.
The remainder of Fletcher’s chapter thus characterizes what’s wrong with narrative (the old kind), according to the view of Richards and the new semiotics-focused field of literary studies. In order to redeem their field from “lack of rigor,” story was dropped in favor of “close reading” and “critical thinking.” Literature from then on, said the New Critics, must be interpreted in this logical, symbolical fashion.
The Common Core adopted all of this in 2010 as “language arts.” (56)
Dan: I thought it was ironic that I.A. Richards was desperate to escape this “intractable problem” and “lack of rigor”; what he considered the "embarrassingly subordinate status" of literary studies using semiotics. Talk about science envy! It's interesting that although the New Criticism added a lot of new paradigms of analysis, it agreed on the general project and created the "deeper consensus: that literature should be interpreted."
The chapter ends with Fletcher explaining what is lost by this approach, namely “a great deal of what poetry, fiction, and theater can teach.” (56) He offers an intriguing grammatical analysis having to do with what writing can and can’t do. Prior to anything being written down, stories were shared orally of course. Later, writing was invented by merchants, regents, and priests for record-keeping purposes, as a “memorial tool,” as a “prompt to help human brains recall things,” but not as a stand-alone representation of reality. (57) Writing, in other words, is not a reality-map. It can be used for any purpose as an aid to human thought, including flagrantly imaginative, fictional, and counterfactual storytelling, and this is what makes it anathema to data-hungry logicians (52), despite its presumably factual original use in record-keeping.
But something interesting happens when you write stuff down. Fletcher analyzes the “functional difference” between nouns and verbs. Nouns refer to objects in space (trees, humans), which can be depicted in a single picture, or a single word, as in the earliest pictographic writing. Verbs, on the other hand, indicate action and depend on time. They can’t capture the picture in the same way. Because action depends on time, “showing” verbs would would require two pictures, a before and an after. Writing can’t do that in a single word (verb).
If the action cannot be captured on the page, then where does it exist? The answer is: It exists in a human brain that reads the page. The brain’s narrative machinery thinks in action, so it can reconstitute the element of time by remembering tree growing, leg running, and other physical motions signaled by verbs. And indeed, our brain’s machinery does this so automatically that it never occurs to most of us that the narrative is not contained in the printed text. (57)
Fletcher goes on to refute the base assumption of semiotics:
The narrative appears to be self-evidently there, explaining the intuitive but faulty belief that Shakespeare is merely language. (58)
“Appears” is the key there. It appears as if narrative is in texts, so that if you work with the text and all its elements, you won’t have lost anything. But if the written word relies upon triggering human thought external to the words (those verbs that can never capture time-bound action), then reducing the text to language symbols alone, loses narrative — which resides in human brains.
Dan: Interesting connection of semiotics all the way back to On Hermeneutics in Aristotle's Organon. Hermeneutics has always seemed to me a bit like a short step to Kabbalah. Reducing texts to sets of propositions is analogous to what Fletcher described previously of reducing actions to (verbs) to things (nouns) so they could fit on the page. However, his elaboration in this chapter seemed a bit nonsensical to me, when I sat back and thought about it for a moment. The whole "What Semiotics Misses" section seems to rely on a step backward that Fletcher makes us take, to an age before words when drawings or hieroglyphics stood for ideas. He says it was easier to draw nouns (tree or man) than verbs (growing or running). This may be true, but that difficulty disappears entirely once we advance to using words. It's as easy to write growing as it is to write tree. I don't see any reason the argument requires this step backward in time, except for Fletcher to make this specious point and say "If the action cannot be captured on the page, then where does it exist?" He says the answer is, "It exists in a human brain that reads the page." Doesn't that apply equally to a brain reading the noun as it does to the brain reading the verb? I think this argument is an abject failure.
In other words, a text never stands alone, but always automatically invokes our brain’s narrative machinery. To read a text as merely a set of symbols, combined into propositions, which can then be interpreted, is to completely miss what writing is for, i.e. to prompt, recall, and aid human thinking. All that is lost on the new approach.
Even though Richards claimed to be analyzing literature more rigorously, he was thus missing most of its original ingredients. And likewise, even though the Common Core emphasized the “extensive reading of stories, dramas, poems, and myths,” it was really only skimming. By converting literature into language and then interpreting languages with semiotics, America’s futuristic curriculum was flattening four-dimensional narratives into two-dimensional propositions that reduced characters to representations and plots to arguments. Behaviors became themes, happenings became meanings, and actions became allegories, expunging much of the psychological activity that Shakespeare and the rest of our global library had been crafted to generate. (58)
If I’m understanding correctly, the new method of reading — which affects all of us educated in the late 20th century and beyond, not just starting in 2010 with the Common Core — simply abandoned the whole normal functioning of human cognitive machinery! The power of ancient oral storytelling and the whole point of writing to prompt human brains to recall things and think creatively is thrown aside. Semiotics does away with what humans do with story, which is not just to map the world (logically), but to play with it, to come up with new possibilities, to test out motivations and actions and likely outcomes.
Over the past century, our educational institutions have programmatically erased the story from the world’s most powerful myths, plays, novels, memoirs, films, comics, and television series, just as the philosophers did to wisdom literature five millennia before. (58)
Our educational institutions have programmatically erased the most powerful way humans are designed to think.
This is quite a claim, and if true (propositionally?), it’s a reality map that needs an active (storythinking!) response.
We humans are badly in need of thinking new ways forward, unhampered by whatever thought-limitations we’ve imposed on ourselves. Recovering “primitive” storythinking might well be an essential old-new way of being, or becoming, better humans in the world.
Dan: Finally, using Shakespeare's plays is probably not the wisest choice. Aren't both Fletcher's narrative and his argument marred by the fact that the plays were not written to be read but acted? This certainly must affect the relative proportions of nouns and verbs on the page, since what would have been verbs in a novel would instead have been actions taken on stage by actors. While I do think I.A. Richards' issues with Shakespeare probably tell us something about the flaws in Richards' thinking, I don't think Fletcher tells this story particularly well.
See you next week for Chapter 5!
Allegorical interpretation existed long before Christian interpreters in late antiquity and the medieval era used it to interpret pagan Greek or Latin texts or the Bible. Despite Fletcher’s criticism of allegory as a (supposed) forebear of semiotics, pre-modern allegory was well-honed across the ages from ancient to Renaissance times and beyond, by pagans as well as by Christians (and Jews and Arabs). It is a respected and productive way of reading and appreciating texts, including sacred ones. The ancients were relatively unconcerned with what later became the “literal” or “historical” (historicized) verity of a text, and they were rarely focused on finding a single true meaning. They were happy to work with multiple layers laid over any text, and they weren’t looking for purely logical propositions or arguments. Thus, I would take Fletcher’s point less as a condemnation of allegory generally (whatever he does with later 20th c semiotics) and more as a hard criticism of the loss of narrative today, i.e. the loss of creative thinking through the thread of story with characters, action, and plot.
Dan: “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.” J.R.R. Tolkien (couldn’t help myself!)