Swan Story: The Narrative Fallacy

It is common knowledge that if a suitor is well-liked by a girl's parents, the girl herself will most likely find him unsuitable. And absolutely: if an infant of mysterious origin appears on an orphanage/farmhouse doorstep and has qualities that set him apart from the other children, he/she is the offspring of royalty, and will one day reassume his/her rightful throne. So decrees the Law of Narrative Necessity.

I stole the term "Law of Narrative Necessity" from Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasy/satire series, which frequently parodies popular myth. According to the L of NN, as soon as you recognize the story, you must play by its rules, be they comic, tragic, or Whedonesque tragicomic. Riding the story flow is all well in fiction, but it may be a fallacy when applied to the interpretation of everyday facts. I first encountered the narrative fallacy in Nassim Taleb's book, The Black Swan, which discusses the difficulty in predicting the influence of random events of great (often disastrous) impact, like, say, a movie starring Natalie Portman adopting the same title as one's bestselling book. Taleb claims that the world is relatively unpredictable, not tailored to familiar conventions like those found in tragic, bird-centered ballets.

But there's a reason that an archetypal ballet compels more people than a book about statistics. Certain constructs (Aristotle's mythos, Freytag's plot structure, Campbell's monomyth) have incumbent toeholds in the popular imagination, and very, very few people are immune to their allure. Narratives hand us a hiking stick and point us to a trail at the foot of a mountain. What lies off the path becomes irrelevant. Because this involves simplifying and focusing, stories can warp and exclude information, leading one to cherry-pick facts to suit the story (in the fiction world, this is called editing). Most people prefer the simpler, "good parts" version with an iconic plot. On the other hand, the postmodern reader may prefer stories with no admirable protagonist or clear plot structure, writing that candidly portrays the absurd idiosyncrasies of the dust bowl during the Great Depression, etc. But isn't it the storyteller's job to make some meaning from that dust? Add a little water and you've got a sandcastle. In the literary world, we choose the coherence level according to our tastes. But what about the world of real laws? Lawyers often weave argument and story together to engage juries. Yet this may require dishonest oversimplification, or deemphasis of ill-fitting evidence, unless it is done carefully.* 

Stories undoubtedly shape our decisions. That said, are you party to any particular narrative structure? Natalie Portman's unfortunate Black Swan character lives out echoes of the macabre ballet, Swan Lake. I'd wager much of our behavior takes root in our favorite childhood narratives--movies memorized, books reread. Don't be surprised if you catch me plagiarizing scraps of The Princess Bride (I memorized the first five pages when I was twelve), The Phantom Tollbooth, or anything by Roald Dahl, literature that created my early affection for pirates and poachers. I have friends who, knowing full-well the corrupting power of such media, have attempted to shield their daughters from Disney princess culture with its pillow-bustle models for femininity, only to find that, chicken-pox like, it took root more powerfully at an older age. I'm not sure whether this princess appeal is enculturated, or is engineered to be so universally attractive that nothing can resist it, like certain nacho-flavored snacks. 

My drawing illustrates Freyag's narrative plot structure, which is really very conveniently snail-shaped. But then, many things in the world are beginning to appear snail-shaped to me these days. Maybe it has something to do with that orphaned sail I found on my doorstep once upon a time.

Just for fun, here's a preliminary sketch containing other notes and doodling.