In many ways, Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction classic is an archetypal story of love, war, moral doubt and the pull of destiny. Yet its more meta-elements reveal two aspects of storytelling that help it remain ever relevant.
The first is how Herbert recreates a familiar history to absorbing effect: Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, regarded as the Islamic Messianic deliverer the Mahdi, finds a precursor in the Mahdist War in Sudan against British-Egyptian forces from 1881 to 1899.
But that itself is a version of the timeless story of a subjugated group rebelling against a powerful oppressor. From one narrative to another – and in this case, also from text to film – stories have been continuously adapted, combined and given fresh spins, feeding some primal need for entertainment and craving for narratives larger than ourselves.
The second clue lies in Zendaya’s character Chani’s very post-colonial insistence that the prophecies told to her people, the Fremen, are merely myths spun by colonisers to hold on to power. Narratives, as she points out, have ideological weight and play a part in society’s overall power structure.
Rather than mere tales told to entertain children, stories are harnessed by different parties to maintain the status quo, persuade somebody to change their mind, or more commonly in today’s capitalistic context, attract someone to buy a product or service.
This impetus has continued on new mediums such as bite-sized TikTok videos, Instagram posts, or Facebook commentaries, and people are bombarded daily with these nuggets in marketing campaigns, influencer videos, and even political speeches.
Though one might not immediately associate it with storytelling, the National Day Rally each year is one such act. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s speech includes a carefully curated cast of inspiring members of the public to sell his broader message about the character and direction of Singapore.
All these stories shape public discourse, including most recently the many posts that added to the outsized lore of Taylor Swift.
They can also lead to the evolution of language. Gen Z slang has evolved almost entirely on TikTok, though the fact that 65 per cent of Singapore respondents told a recent study they were unfamiliar with popular slang like “slay” does indicate that the problem of social media bubbles may daily be getting worse.
The storytelling instinct
To debate if storytelling will become obsolete is to debate human nature. Philosophers have long argued that it is only through stories that humans can understand the world – and themselves.
One of the fundamental building blocks of narrative is cause and effect. Immanuel Kant, in the 18th century, thought it was inherently human to view random events through such a prism, one of the filters that shape and limit the ordering of experience.
Likewise, American historian Hayden White did not believe the repetition of pure facts was possible in recording history. Instead, facts are inevitably strung together in a narrative, adhering to certain modes like romance, tragedy, comedy and satire.
In Cat Bohannon’s recently published Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years Of Human Evolution (2023), the scientist, who studies the “evolution of narrative and cognition”, speculates that one of the earliest acts of language transmission is through a mother making up a story to tell her child.
It is difficult to ascertain this first story ever told, Bohannon acknowledges, but it was likely about survival, incorporating knowledge that the mother had learnt. This was a milestone in human progress, with future generations finally able to build on the achievements of their ancestors beyond what is unconsciously transmitted through the genetic code.
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And so this very successful strategy for evolutionary survival has continued. Author Jeanette Winterson, at the Singapore Writers Festival in 2022, insisted that everyone can and should make claim to storyteller status.
People spin stories daily for their spouses and friends about their lives, no matter how honest or dishonest, and through these, connect and share parts of themselves and form relationships and communities. More broadly, of course, national and cultural knowledge is archived in the stories told in national museums.
Recently, there has been a more pressing debate in the storytelling community on the role of fiction. With atrocities happening around the world, and with so many real stories that have been suppressed and left untold, some authors and artists find make-believe stories unethical, and occupying undeserved space.
The Trump presidency and his frequent use of the phrase “fake news” to discredit stories he did not like have also suddenly made the lines between truth and falsehood matter more than ever. In this climate, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, is treating disaster with eloquence ever acceptable?
But there remains continued reasons to allow storytellers to invent and reinvent.
First, few fictional efforts are completely solipsistic or apocryphal. Their combining elements of different stories is precisely what allows them to reach a more general truth.
This weight of uncovering minority stories also inevitably falls unfairly on the shoulders of minority storytellers, whose more privileged counterparts have for so long had the latitude to tell the stories they want.
As many minority storytellers have said, they, too, want this liberty, even if they are telling objectively bad stories, or even if what they are concerned with is not about their own communities directly. Limiting their imagination by foisting upon them the responsibility of being their community’s representative is yet another form of repression.
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But more importantly, to so clearly demarcate between fiction and non-fiction is dangerous and a fundamental misunderstanding of how storytelling works. Yes there are facts, but as Kant and White point out, these always need to be interpreted, the empty spaces coloured in, cause and effect or correlation established.
The point is not to adamantly insist on a theoretical story of pure facts or only non-fiction, but rather elevate ethical storytelling that does not purposely obfuscate or misrepresent, or claim to be the only “Ur-story” possible.
The ideological nature of stories means that it is naive to expect all storytellers to adhere to this principle, which is why it is important to build a story-literate citizenship that is willing to stay open-minded while remaining critical of the stories they consume.
Story literacy
The culture war in the United States over banning the teaching of certain books in classrooms is proof that a top-down approach to controlling what people read is no solution.
Groups like the conservative Moms For Liberty advocate against any part of the school curriculum that mentions LGBT rights and critical race theory. The impulse reveals a fear of the power of stories to shape students’ worlds, but is also obviously political.
The policing of narratives presumes an ideological position that is not always correct, not to mention futile in a digital age, when any book can be downloaded with a few taps on a screen.
Instead, the focus should be on nurturing mature readers, so that they approach texts not just to find answers, but to ask questions. Good stories facilitate empathy and critical thinking – skills that, when honed, help people treat narratives they see online or hear with a healthy amount of scepticism without becoming a cynic.
This habitus is increasingly important in an increasingly complex world, when sensitive issues such as the Russia-Ukraine war, the United States-China divide and the Gaza war have thrown up so many perspectives that some have suggested it is better to just not talk about them at all, if a complete understanding is impossible.
But this would be a surrender, risking an even more disengaged – and apathetic – citizenry. The sheer mass of human experience means no party can make full claim to a narrative; a story-literate readership understands this and stays alive to the possibilities.
The incompleteness of each narrative is not a setback, but a bridgehead into the subject, so that people can continue to explore, and form a tentative opinion based on the principles of empathy and justice as they have come to understand them.
So while we may now have less time for stories, they are needed much more than ever to fulfil their purpose of provoking thought and reflection, pre-empting close-mindedness, and giving people a point of access into an otherwise incomprehensible world.
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