The Faraway Nearby
鈥淲e are ourselves stories, telling and being told.鈥� This is the central claim of Rebecca Solnit鈥檚 mesmerizing new book, The Faraway Nearby.
In Solnit鈥檚 view, we build our world and ourselves out of stories: we are always listening to them or telling them, adapting them or creating them, sharing them or hoarding them. 鈥淲here does a story begin?鈥� Solnit asks. 鈥淭he fiction is that they do, and end, rather than that the stuff of a story is just a cup of water scooped from the sea and poured back into it.鈥� For Solnit, the world is stories all the way down.
"The Faraway Nearby" is, at its core, an examination of the storytelling impulse, though 鈥渆xamination鈥� is far too stuffy a word to describe this delightful book. Solnit wears many different professional hats 鈥� she鈥檚 an award-winning historian as well as an activist, critic, and public intellectual 鈥� and "The Faraway Nearby" is itself a strange mixture of genres.
At times, the book reads like a work of literary criticism, as when Solnit offers interpretations of Mary Shelley鈥檚 "Frankenstein" and Hans 海角大神 Anderson鈥檚 鈥淭he Snow Queen.鈥� At other times, it reads like cultural anthropology, following folk tales as they are passed on from generation to generation, culture to culture, shifting and sliding in the process: 鈥淪tories migrate; meanings migrate; everything metamorphoses.鈥�
At still other times, it reads like a memoir. Running like a thread through the book鈥檚 labyrinthine structure is Solnit鈥檚 account of her mother鈥檚 struggles with Alzheimer鈥檚, a disease that is so terrifying precisely because it breaks down a person鈥檚 sense of self, the story that person tells about how he or she got from the past to the present. Solnit imagines her ailing mother as a 鈥渂ook coming apart, pages drifting away, phrases blurring, letters falling off鈥� 鈥� she is, in short, a story that is being untold.
"The Faraway Nearby" isn鈥檛 so much a single, coherent argument about the nature of stories, as it is a series of meditations upon the subject. Solnit understands 鈥渟tory鈥� in the most encompassing sense. Illness, she argues, is a kind of story 鈥� here is how I moved from health to sickness. So are legal cases, with the defendant and the prosecutor each trying to convince the jury of a particular narrative; so is history; so is the life of a nation; so is the life of an individual; the list goes on.
The sheer quantity of stories that Solnit gathers together in one place is staggering. She offers her thoughts on "The Chronicles of Narnia" and on "The Buddhacarita," on the Inuit story of the 鈥淪keleton Woman鈥� and on the German fairy tale 鈥淭he Juniper Tree.鈥� "The Faraway Nearby," in other words, doesn鈥檛 tell a story about stories. It tells stories about stories, drifting from one narrative to the next, using each story as a springboard for broader considerations. This rhizomatic structure is simultaneously bewildering 鈥� you find yourself wondering how you got from Che Guevara to the Roadrunner in a matter of pages 鈥� and exhilarating.
Despite its digressive style, "The Faraway Nearby" does put forward several concrete claims about the nature and purpose of storytelling. Solnit argues that stories, both in the telling and in the listening, allow for an expansion of the self that can lead to empathy. The word empathy, Solnit tells us, comes from the German Einfuhlung, which means 鈥渇eeling into,鈥� and it is by listening to another鈥檚 story, by imagining their story as our story, that we come to recognize and care about existences other than our own. (Solnit regularly uses etymology to clarify her own language. Even individual words, it appears, have stories to tell.)
If stories can lead to empathy, then they also can lead to a rigidity of mind and spirit: once you鈥檝e told yourself a story about something 鈥� another person, another race, another world 鈥� it鈥檚 hard to un-tell it. Solnit describes the 鈥渢emptation of a neat ending, that point when you bring the boat to shore and tie it to the dock and give up the wide sea.鈥�
Solnit鈥檚 own book refuses this temptation. Ends are never tied up but always lead to new beginnings; one story simply gives way to another and another and another. As Solnit writes, 鈥淭he quest is the holy grail, the ocean itself is the mysterious elixir, and if you鈥檙e lucky you realize it before you dock at the cup in the chapel.鈥�
Anthony Domestico鈥檚 reviews have appeared in the TLS, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the book columnist for Commonweal.
