The Metaphysics of Storytelling

I love to get lost in a good story – I’ve been doing so since at least the fourth grade, when one of my teachers handed me a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth. Having become a professional writer, I like to think I can weave a fairly decent story myself, but then, you’ll be the judge of that I suppose.

There’s something seemingly metaphysical that occurs in reading a story – I think it happens at the precise point where you stop seeing little patterns of words on the page or the screen and suddenly see instead what the words mean (this is the Delta Phenomenon as described by Owen Barfield – that moment when the words become the thing they describe – which gets into symbolic reasoning). You’re drawn in, the space around you dematerializes and you are immersed the images that the story conjures. All stories, in this sense, are incantations.

Storytelling is, by nature, translocation between the physical realm and the one described/imagined. A story, a tale, can take on other properties and purposes: illusion, invocation, conjuration, exorcism. Sometimes, just briefly, it can be necromancy – gently sliding a pin through the veil, so as to whisper between worlds with absent friends and family.

When it comes to storytelling as magic, I can think of few equal to Clive Barker. He’s a master storyteller, across multiple mediums ranging from literature and film to visual art and video games. His work is often and best known for being otherworldly, in ways both inspiring and terrifying. He knows how to pluck the right word, the right phrase to summon the right image, all the while moving us toward the destination he’s planned.

I’ll leave you with a passage from his novel Sacrament that has stayed with me over the years; about storytelling as act of both creation and completion:

“I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives?

So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.”