Where Is The Book Festival Brave Enough To Come Out Against "The Power of Storytelling"?

This weekend marked my fourth book festival this year. I’ve had a terrific time at each one, and hope to speak at many more, but I do have a strong suspicion at this point that everyone who attends a book festival, either as a panelist, a bookseller, a reader, an author, an agent, or all of the above, is already sold on the power of storytelling. The same is almost certainly true for the power of the imagination, and the power of words (or “the written word” if you’re really laying it on thick). Therefore we can take it as a given that everyone is on the same page when it comes to storytelling, imagination, and words, and it is no longer necessary to invoke those powers during the welcome speech, or on flyers, or during introductions. If you have ever been to a book festival (or a reading at a bookstore, or a library event, or a Q&A with a group of authors), you likely know the sort of speech I mean: “Congratulations to everyone for being here, you are doing something important by liking books, you have correctly identified the power of storytelling, storytelling is powerful and important, thank you for appreciating the power of a good story.”

These speeches are always very kind and very genuine, and I don’t mean to suggest that they are in fact wicked, wrong, or foolish — but I do think the point has been successfully, almost universally made, and there might be a useful opportunity to make a different kind of welcoming speech in future.

That’s not to say storytelling can’t possibly be powerful. It probably is! But if we can’t get a real diversity of opinion going on the subject, let’s at least hunt for a synonym or two. Must storytelling always be powerful in order for us to care about it? Can’t it occasionally be merely worthwhile, or interesting? Might it even, once in a while, be third-rate? And if all books are wonderful and terrific simply because they tell stories, then what use is there to discriminate between them, to exercise our faculties of judgment and taste, to prefer some over others? Why prefer a particular book by a particular person with a certain point of view, if the idea is just to read them all, because reading itself is the highest good?

They do the same thing at film festivals, in my experience. After the book festival was over, I snuck across town to the final screening of my beloved Turner Classic Film Festival, a restoration of the 1926 Beau Geste accompanied by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. It was a terrific experience, and of course the presenters congratulated all of us in the audience for caring about movies first.

I am as vain and lazy as the next man, and I do enjoy being praised for my leisure pursuits as if they were in themselves a mark of courage and distinction, but I do grow slightly uneasy at the uniform praise for merely liking books or movies, as if they were all interchangeably and universally good for one. It feels anxious, somehow, as if the person praising storytelling doesn’t quite believe that they care about reading enough, or in quite the right way, and they need to add to its value.

I don’t go to tennis matches very often, but I don’t recall any invocation at the beginning celebrating the power of tennis – although I’m sure everyone on the court and in the stands cares about tennis a great deal, and thinks it brings pleasure and meaning into their lives.

I do like to read, for what it’s worth.¹ I quite like watching movies! I would rather go to a festival for books than a festival for, say, “playing Civilization 6 alone for hours with the shades drawn.”² But I think it’s an interest of mine, rather than a virtue. I think some books are better than others; I think some books are very bad indeed. I like going to the movies, but I’ve seen some movies I wish I’d never watched at all; I take no reassurance in saying, “Well, at least I saw a movie today,” as if a movie were a multivitamin.³ Nor do I think my personal enjoyment of reading is an important counterbalance against, say, book bans, which almost always target and surveil minors; it always strikes me as misguided when I see an adult describing a haul of recently-purchased books as a blow against bans. This makes me feel churlish, because I think it’s well-meaning and likely harmless, and I don’t mean to make it sound like those people are foolish or ought to feel chastened. It’s often quite difficult to know what to do when one feels powerless.

A similar tic has to do with “counting” — as in, whether certain types of reading “counts,” as one sometimes hears about in the mostly-imagined controversy over audiobooks. Someone at the most recent book festival mentioned they had just finished reading something, then paused before saying in an attitude that was equal parts playful and defensive, “Actually, it was an audiobook, which counts.” But no one is keeping score! Or if anyone were ill-bred enough to try to do so, their opinion would of course hold no real weight, no true authority – after about the seventh or eighth grade, there are no more prizes to be distributed for quantity of books read.

It isn’t that I’m really against storytelling (although at this point I would be interested in hearing an argument against it, if only for the novelty!), so much as I think I’ve heard its merits sufficiently praised at this point, and we ought to be able to rest secure in that for a while, and talk about something else. Maybe it’s just that I think if something really is powerful, and everyone agrees that it is, we don’t have to keep mentioning its power, and when we do, I start to get anxious that we don’t really believe ourselves — otherwise why would we keep repeating it?

But first I must confess that I’ve been a terrible hypocrite: The conductor on this train just came through the sleeping car, bawling for “Tickets! Tickets!” and thanked everyone for taking the train. I felt smug and pleased with myself for being praised. I am a good person for taking the train. I’m saving the world. I do believe in the power of trains, and so do all of the other wonderful people on board.

And at dinner the other night, I even swapped books with my table-companion. I didn’t think much of the book I received, but I felt absolutely terrific for taking it.

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1. Right now I’m reading Dominique Fabre’s “The Waitress Was New,” translated by Jordan Stump, Elizabeth Hawes’ Fashion is Spinach, and The Golden Argosy, ed. Cartmell & Grayson, and enjoying all of them very much. I recently finished Hannah Baer’s trans girl suicide museum and found it a real slog, but I’m still glad I read it, in part because I think there’s value in defining the outlines of one’s taste and in part because I think it’s interesting to think about writing I dislike, and why (And of course, reading about someone else’s experiences on drugs, carefully detailed, is often very dull because drug addiction is a dull and repetitive business).

2. Playing Civilization 6 alone for hours is another hobby I enjoy, although it’s a much more complicated enjoyment, because it’s also a real time-suck and I’m a lot more antisocial while I play it.

3. Which may not be especially beneficial, either.