Stories: in Progress

Shakespeare’s Prospero says, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on . . .” Prospero doesn’t say that our lives are composed of dreams, as in the bland directive to “live your dreams,” but rather, that our lives are the source material for our dreams and even our nightmares. Prospero suggests neither that our life is a dream—though some, are said to possess dream lives, nor does he say that our lives enact our dreams—or even our nightmares. Our life, continues Prospero, is bounded by sleep: the sleep before birth when we are enwombed and the sleep after death when we are entombed. But until that latter time, when as Hamlet fears, dreams may come when we have shuffled off that mortal coil and we are no longer capable of doing anything from those dreams, in that interim between that before and the after, well, that is our daily lives. Our dreams do not direct our lives, but it is our lives which influence our dreams.

Now, this would be almost a cliché—we no longer hold that our dreams are the work of the gods and that their influence is evident in our dreams— but one implication of Prospero’s statement suggests that our dreams are stories about our lives. Freud refers to the daily lives in which we engage as the dream day, and that from these activities—the dream day—the dream work draws material into a narrative structure to construct the dream. Freud says that the “The dream work . . . does not think, calculate, or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form.” That is, the dream work creates stories from the raw material of the day and though many might say that we are more than our stories, ironically, we would not know that until we tell the story. In waking life we story the dream-story, and then these diurnal lives become the resources for the next dream. The narrator of José Saramajo’s novel, Blindness, says, “All stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.” We tell the story so that we know what happened, and until we narrate the story, we don’t know what happened. 

In James McBride’s novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Newspaper, whose nickname is Paper, narrates the news to the community that cannot (or will not) read. But her listeners insist that she make the news be a story. Rusty says to Paper, “C’mon Paper . . . story it up like you know how. Put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” Why she should do so, Paper asks Rusty, and he answers, “’Cause if you tell it any other way, it’ll sound like a lie.” Unless there is a story all that can be had would be the facts, but the facts are empty and meaningless without the context from which they were first embedded and from which they are drawn. We demand context for sense, and the narration of that context provides the story. The Stage Manager in Wilder’s Our Town says, “In our town we like to know the facts about everybody,” but though the play displays the facts, that is not what the play depicts: it is the lives that Emily comes to understand as imperfect without the story. Emily says, “They don’t understand much, do they? . . . That’s all human beings are!—Just blind people.” To see only the facts is to miss life. Thus, we narrate, and “story it up . . . put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” We can always tell the story.

Engaged in daily life we have a tendency not to think at all about it: mostly in their lives people go through their diurnal existences attending to the facts. But then we dream, the dream work operates on the dream day and creates the story that carries into the next day and that can be narrated, and these narrations become the storied material of daily life. Consumed in the immediacy of experience we lack context and do not narrate, but even the slightest distance allows space for the story, and the story happens when we connect up the facts. One narrator, Ben, in Anne Michael’s novel Fugitive Pieces says, “But the search for facts, for places, names influential events, important conversations and correspondences, political circumstances—all this amounts to nothing if you can’t find the assumption your subject lives by.” The facts obscure, and if they do not lie, then they don’t tell the truth. While in the throes of turmoil the emotion consumes and seems to be all that exists and the emotion becomes the fact. But when the raw and immediate emotion subsides then the possibility of story arises. Wilder’s Emily is correct: attending to the facts the citizens of Grovers Corners don’t know anything. But the play, Wilder’s story, Our Town, well, it knows. So is it in Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake. Patchett’s Emily narrates to her adult daughters the story of her summer affair with the television and movie star, Peter Duke, a passionate affair that had ended when Duke had taken up with the actor who had replaced Emily in the play and in life when Emily’s Achilles heel had become torn. In modern parlance, Duke had ghosted Emily: he had stopped all communication with her. Hearing this story, Emily’s daughter, Maisie, responds to Duke’s behavior with anger, but Emily says, “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.” She has narrated that story to her daughters. At the end of the day (and even of a life) the story tells what it all felt like and even what it all might have meant. But, of course, it is only a story. In The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store at the livery stable “somebody’s up late and talking.” They are telling a story. And Ann Patchett’s Emily, who had played Emily in Our Town in high school, college, and summer stock, is correct: all we ever have is the story. The facts are meaningless until they inspire the story. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and the dream knowingly or unknowingly becomes storied. First, the daily life and then the storied dream. We define ourselves by the stories we tell. We know others from the stories they tell. Fatty, in McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, had learned that the Nate Timblin he has come to now known was not the same Nate Timblin who had served time in prison. “Rather, he was a story, a wisp, a legend, a force, a fright.” I think the same might be said of us all.