E.G.

There’s been a fair amount of discussion recently about the conjecture that Kerry’s defeat might have been due to his lack of a compelling "story to tell" about his life and campaign.  (Timothy Burke’s post on this issue is an especially engaging one.)   

The election was, of course, quite close, so slight changes to initial conditions could have produced a completely different result.  For instance, if the distribution of cases of the flu in Iowa had been slightly different, with a few more outbreaks in key Republican counties, that might have been enough to produce a Kerry victory.  But a story of Kerry’s loss in terms of random variables like the flu is not a very compelling one.  So, after the election, Democrats began a quest in search of a compelling story to tell about Kerry’s loss.  That quest, apparently, is finally done.  As it turns out, the compelling story which explains Kerry’s loss is the story of how Kerry himself had no story.  Good story.  But is it true?

Talking about something completely different, Will Wilkinson says this about the search for stories:

Explanations are like stories, and convincing stories have characters who do stuff. The media has to tell a story, and the simpler the better. Nation-states, it turns out, are like giant people who can do stuff and make things happen. So if people are mired in poverty, what can be done! Have the League of Magical Giants sprinkle manna on the heads of the downtrodden! This is a story even a journalist can understand. However, the story where millions of individuals give small amounts of money to intermediary institutions, who administer funds to projects helping poor people on the ground . . . well, millions of people isn’t a good character, and all those different charities and institutions doing different things with their bits of money is hard to follow.

"Stories," in the present sense, render events intelligible, coherent and interesting.  Sometimes the actual events themselves really are intelligible, coherent, and interesting.  In those cases, it is at least possible to tell stories about those events which have the advantage of being true.  But when events don’t have those three qualities, we cannot tell stories about them without misrepresenting them.  The events of Kerry’s life may, as many have argued, lack one or more of those three qualities.  But perhaps the same is true of the election itself, as well.