Comforting Conversations, pt.1

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions…

Ray Briggs
…everything except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you from our respective shelters in place via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy and Josh directs the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Josh Landy
Today we’re presenting the first of two episodes featuring comforting conversations.

Ray Briggs
We’ll be talking to some of our favorite Stanford colleagues about how the arts and humanities can provide comfort, connection, and common purpose in a world of social distancing.

Josh Landy
There’s actually quite a long tradition behind that. Rhe Roman philosopher Lucretius, for example, spent many lines describing the Plague of Athens.

Ray Briggs
And the point was that if you become a good optimist, even plagues won’t trouble you. So philosophy has been on the job of soothing anxious souls for centuries.

Josh Landy
And since Lucretius’ book was actually a long poem, literature has been on the job for centuries too.

Ray Briggs
So we send our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to check in with some biblio-therapists to learn more about literary medicine. She files this report.

Holly McDede
Before Bijal Shah prescribed books, she worked as a banker at Deutsche Bank. Money notably is rarely considered healing or therapeutic. During her maternity leave, she enrolled in evening classes in psychodynamic counseling and psychotherapy. As a part of her training, she enrolled in therapy herself.

Bijal Shah
And what I found was that I would be reaching out for literature every time I had a session.

Holly McDede
She turned to Greek literature for the metaphors,

Echo & Narcissus
And they came out on the mountain. Narcissus was driving and knitting and killing the deer, when Echo saw him.

Bijal Shah
I then started exploring this further and I thought, actually, there’s something in here there’s something quite powerful in terms of me just connecting with the literature connecting with the characters.

Holly McDede
A few years ago, Shaw launched a book therapy practice, and now she prescribes people books to read to support their mental health and well being this concept isn’t new. The idea of bibliotherapy goes back to ancient civilizations, the team’s library centers for healing. Aristotle describe the therapeutic power of books.

Bijal Shah
It’s been something that we’ve been doing for millennia.

Holly McDede
And more recently.

Bijal Shah
It’s sort of really took hold in WWI, especially when you had soldiers who were managing a lot of postwar trauma. And books were a phenomenal source of comfort for them. And you would see, you know, medical doctors prescribing literature.

Holly McDede
Shah says during this pandemic, people are again turning to books. Her main job is to help people find books that can relate to. She prescribes Julia Cameron’s “The Creative Life,” a guide for people looking to pursue art while sheltering in place.

Julia Cameron
Creativity, like human life itself, begins in darkness.

Holly McDede
And “My Groans Pour Out Like Water” by Francis Bloom, a poetry collection that deals with grieving.

Francis Bloom
My love, are you drinking from the sweet waters of the far north, or are you on the path of an old drive with a great herd by your side?

Holly McDede
She suggested the philosophical memoir, “A Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life” by David Brooks.

David Brooks
Nietzsche says that he who has a “why” to live for can endure any “how.” If you know what your purpose is, you can handle the setbacks.

Holly McDede
The biggest thing Shah has noticed is that people are searching for the intellectual and existential deep books.

Chad Perman
All the stuff that happened nationally a few weeks later, kind of happened here first,

Holly McDede
Chad Perman, a therapist based in Seattle prescribes books as well and cinema. His office is less than a mile away from the nursing home where some of the earliest COVID-19 cases in the US were reported.

Chad Perman
They were kind of half living our lives like normal and trying to just hope it went away and then also trying to be more cautious and then the panic buying.

Holly McDede
Perman says at first people looked for existential books and movies. But now he says people he works with are actually less focused on understanding the mysteries of life.

Chad Perman
People don’t have a lot of capacity right now. They just are pretty overwhelmed.

Holly McDede
His clients are more interested in using cinema to escape or remember moments that made them happy,

Chad Perman
Something they watched that really resonated with them, you know, even stuff like, I used to watch this movie with my dad. I’m just really missing not been able to see my dad right now during all this.

Holly McDede
Perman has also been turning to movies he’s always loved, like “The Tree of Life,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Moonstruck.” But what he tells every client is if you’re not ready to read The Canterbury Tales, or watch inception, you don’t have to

Chad Perman
If nothing else, please, please give yourself a break. Please be gentle on yourself. It’s okay to not really know what the right thing to do is right now because there’s not a right thing to do.

Holly McDede
Biblio-therapy can help, but therapy can be expensive. We can prescribe ourselves artwork too. Sometimes all we need is to try and remember books we already have on our shelves.

Seinfeld
I returned that book. I remember it very specifically.

Holly McDede
Philosophy Talk. I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks so much, Holly, for that educational and therapeutic report. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague read Briggs. And today we’re beginning a series of comforting conversations about how literature and the arts can sue their anxious souls.

Ray Briggs
Before we hear from our other Stanford colleagues, tere’s a book that I really like to talk about. It’s The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio.

Josh Landy
Ah, fantastic. I love that book. 100 stories over 10 days.

Ray Briggs
rRght, and it’s in the aftermath of the plague in the 14th century. So all of these 14th century nobles go out to an estate, and they decide to tell each other stories. And then we get this frame story around all these different little stories about the plague.

Josh Landy
Right. And one of the things I love about it is that the way in which that frame proceeds with Boccaccio talking about all the different strategies that people adopted for dealing with the plague and for understanding the plague.

Ray Briggs
I mean, one thing that leaps out is that he says that they all died in roughly the same amount, regardless of what they did. It’s very fatalistic.

Josh Landy
The thing I love is that, you know, he’s very subtly poking fun, at a certain kind of religious framework where some of these people were saying it’s a punishment from heaven. And then he’ll say, of course, you know, of the people who held these opinions. Not all of them died, but neither do they all.

Ray Briggs
Right, I think that skepticism about sort of the Odyssey and also about clergy kind of runs through the whole thing when clergy do not come off well in the story. And in fact, I noticed that a lot of the stories are kind of explicitly moralized by the storytellers, though sort of tell you the moral of this story is that you shouldn’t think that women are chaste all the time, or the moral of the story is that if you’re going to tell a lie, you better be really clever about it. How seriously actually, do you think that we should take the moralizing? Like is that all meant to be read just literally is some of it ironic?

Josh Landy
I think it’s a great question, because you think about what the culture says right? At the end, in the epilogue, he says, you know, these were stories told by young people, but they were old enough to know that you shouldn’t get carried away by stories, right? You shouldn’t base your beliefs about the world and human nature and how things go on mirror fictions, right. And he also says, In the epilogue, no good word ever improved. A corrupt mind, no bad word ever corrupted? A good mind. So it’s, I think, you know, we maybe should take some of these morals with a grain of salt, maybe not all of them. But I think that’s part of the difficult work that these stories are requiring from us. I mean, he, here’s one example. One of the characters in the camera, and nearly other, there are 10 young folk who get together and basically shelter in place together and tell these stories, she tells a number of stories, two of which are totally in contradiction to one another. And one of them is basically saying, you know, wives should be submissive to their husbands and do whatever the husbands say. And the other story is saying wives should stand up for themselves and not just be pushed around. And so we actually have worked. Uh, yeah, if you just read the stories, I kind of pass away and say, okay, yeah, you know, that’s the moral of the story, I get it. You’re not doing all the work I think Boccaccio wants you to do, and thereby you’re not allowing the stories to find you and your capacity for ingenuity.

Ray Briggs
So that was a plague. We’ve got a plague now. Are there any morals to be drawn?

Josh Landy
Well, I do think we wouldn’t do badly to carry over the amused skepticism about this being a punishment from God. I mean, there was a preacher who said it was we’ve got COVID-19 is a gay marriage. There’s an Israeli rabbi who said something similar. And I think maybe we should be laughing at that the same way that Boccaccio invites us to laugh about this, that happening with the Black Death?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, it does. It does drive home, how connected we are with the past that there have been like, awful clergy for a long, long time. And there have been people who think they have more control over their lives than they do for a long, long time.

Josh Landy
Yes. And to have that attitude to say, you know, we’ve heard that boring, that might actually be a healthy response.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I actually have another thing that I’d like to draw from the Decameron, which is, you might expect a bunch of really depressing stories from this, like plague era literature. But in fact, you’ve got just a range, like some of them are depressing. Some of them are just silly. Some of them are sublime, but you have this whole range of literature and also song. And so the idea that art can provide this source of like humanity and like, maybe escape, but maybe also just keeping in touch with your human feelings like that is something that I’d like to take From the camera, and

Josh Landy
I love that idea because you know, you’ve got a frame that’s about the plague. But then the plague pretty much exits the scene and what you’re left with for the 100 stories are stories about funny stories, moving stories, tragic stories, powerful stories, but they’re just stories about human existence. And maybe that’s a thing for us. You know, of course, it’s good to spend time thinking about COVID, reading about COVID and watching movies about plagues and so on. But there’s nothing wrong with also reading and watching things like Boccaccio where these are serious entertainments. They’re a kind of distraction from the plague, but they’re not mere bubblegum, right? They’re, they’re keeping our brains alive. Our bodies have to stay healthy. But our brains also have to stay healthy. We got to keep our email going, right? And the sociability part that these stories bring the group together, we don’t just sit and watch our show. And that’s it. We often recommend it to other people, and we want to know what they think about it. And, and we exchange anecdotes and stories. And maybe there’s a little bit of that same ethos that’s still with us today. Well, yes, we’re all stuck in our own houses, but doesn’t mean we can’t come together over beautiful, powerful works of art.

Bob Dylan
‘Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood. When blackness was a virtue, the road was full of mud. I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form. Come in, she said, I’ll give you shelter from the storm.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re finding shelter from uncertain times in conversations about literature and the arts.

Josh Landy
Coming up, we’ll hear from colleagues in literature and philosophy about the value of stories, fiction, and one novel in particular, as sources of strength and wisdom in a socially distanced world.

Ray Briggs
Comforting conversations with our colleagues —when Philosophy Talk continues.

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, and we’re thinking about how the arts and humanities can help us stay thoughtful and cheerful as we navigate our new unfamiliar landscape. I’m Ray Briggs, here with my Stanford colleague, Josh Landy.

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by our fellow Stanford philosopher, Lanier Anderson. He’s written about nature, redemption, and how we can all connect with one another. And lately, he’s been thinking a lot about a novel that’s become something of a fixture in the COVID canon. Lanier, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Lanier Anderson
It’s so great to be here. Thanks, Josh.

Ray Briggs
Linear, you want to talk to us about Camus’ book “The Plague,” which has recently become a huge seller. Do you think that this is a good book to read for a COVID-19 era?

Lanier Anderson
It is actually a good book to read in spite of being commented upon by everybody in the world for the last several weeks. In fact, my favorite of these recent comments was by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, he said, and I quote, until last week, no one ever thought that Camus the plague was about the plague. He was the text through which generations of high schoolers were taught not to read literally, it was always taken as an allegory of the German occupation of France. And that made me think of my first lecture on the plague in my class, the first sentence of which is, in the first instance, the plague is a novel about illness. The reason I think it’s important to see that it is a novel about illness is that it’s a novel about a communicable illness. And that turns out to be a deeply illuminating metaphor for thinking much more broadly about the human condition. And I think that’s why it applies so beautifully to the current situation where we have another epidemic that is forcing us to think about the human condition.

Ray Briggs
So before we start getting into the human condition, what happens in the novel?

Lanier Anderson
Maybe the most interesting thing about this novel is that the plague itself is, in an important sense, the protagonist of the novel. In fact, Camus spends the whole first part of the book, introducing the plague itself as a kind of character. And then after he’s introduced this character, who causes one person after another to fall ill and die, and finally closes off the town from the outside world. Then it becomes a story about various other characters who fight against the plague or thrive under played conditions or get separated from their loved ones or something like that. So for example, there’s a doctor who’s working on the disease and setting up hospitals and sanitary measures to fight the disease. There’s the head of a bunch of volunteer sanitary squads, there’s a criminal whose prosecution gets suspended by the disease. There’s a journalist who separated from his wife or anyway partner who lives in Paris, a priest who confronts the plague with the resources of religion and so forth. All of these characters interact with the plague itself and with each other in interesting ways. During the course of this period of confinement where the town is quarantined from the rest of the world.

Ray Briggs
I wanted to ask about the journalists to try to get stuck in the town, he gets quarantined while he is sort of covering the plague. And then spends like most of the novel trying to get out to see his wife who he is in love with. And then when he finally gets the chance, does not try to escape, but stays there. What do we make of that?

Lanier Anderson
It’s fascinating. So in my way of thinking about it, can you use is the contrast between the journalist whose name is Ron there, and the doctor whose name is Rhea, to set up a kind of conflict between two fundamental top values or two fundamental ways of thinking about the world, the doctor and also to rue the head of the sanitary squads are trying to understand people and help them out of a kind of understanding or sympathetic empathy with them. The journalist has, Ron bear has the top value of love. And he thinks that saving man or helping other people has no value if you have lost track of the ability to devote yourself in love to another individual. And the novel sets up these two core evaluative commitments in conflict with each other. And Teru basically traps from there into giving up his pathetic self isolation, self pitying attitude that he adopts most of the time, he’s trying to just get out of the town, and join up with the sanitary squads. And the way he does it, is by waiting for Ron bear to say something really a little bit hostile to the doctor about how he doesn’t understand what it’s like to be in love. And then he lets the doctor leave the room and says, Oh, Ron, bear, you didn’t know did you that the doctor’s wife is in a sanatorium outside the city, and he hasn’t seen her for months. So after that, robear is shamed into joining the sanitary squads. And he comes to identify himself with the fight against plague in the town because of the work he does there. And his reason for not leaving, is that once he had identified himself with the fight against plague in the town by helping people, then if he had left, he would have felt like he had abandoned people he was committed to, and that would have embarrassed his love itself, and he wouldn’t have been able to hold his head up right? In his relationship with his wife. It’s a fascinating transformation.

Ray Briggs
So do you think that like these two value systems just end up agreeing about what to do?

Lanier Anderson
No, the doctor Rhea tells Ron bear, he should leave. I think that the camera wants us to see that there’s an intractable and ineluctable conflict between our commitment to individual other people, which can sometimes bring us happiness, and our commitment to a more abstract collective human enterprise, which is much riskier, and is much more likely to end in failure or a tragedy, but without which we can’t really live with ourselves. There’s a kind of dialectic here, the disease and, you know, makes it clear that we have to engage in a certain kind of human solidarity with each other. But that’s always in a tight relationship with the need for isolation from other people. So the way that we enact the solidarity that we have with each other is precisely by isolating from one another. But we understand that not through our instinctive intimate connection to other people, but only at this sort of abstract level.

Josh Landy
So that seems pretty timely, right? We shelter in place, not for ourselves, but for everyone else, right. So there’s a, I feel like that’s a place is a really powerful intersection between the plague and what we’re all going through now.

Lanier Anderson
And there’s also a flipside point here. It’s true that we do the right thing by each other, by isolating ourselves from each other. But at the same time, the point of isolating ourselves from each other is only so that later we can re establish solidarity so that we limit the damage to our community and to the people in it, so that we can reconnect with them after the disease passes. And if we didn’t have that instrumental connection to a possible future together, our isolation wouldn’t have the point that it does.

Josh Landy
That’s a really good point. Actually, it brings me to another question I have for you about this novel, because it’s often understandably often understood as an existentialist novel. But it’s an existentialist novel in Camus second phase, right where in its first phase He’s really interested in the individual, and how the individual faces the absurdity of the human condition faced with the inevitability of death and the the necessary meaningless Ness that that sheds on our endeavors. But in a second phase, he’s trying to get a kind of solidarity out of that so that this facing up to our human condition can actually bring us all together. Is that what’s happening in the past in the novel The plague that is there something you talked about the external threat of the plague bringing people together in this special kind of distance solidarity, which is a hope for a more close solidarity later. But is there an existentialist part to this too.

Lanier Anderson
I think there is a real does feel when you’re reading the book, like the committed existentialist hero who has a kind of radically individual commitment to the values that he has without being able to ground those values in some objective facts or some larger structure. But there is this really deep social dimension that the metaphor of the plague brings to the fore. And I actually see the novel as in deep dialogue with Sartre and existentialism, in particular, the core philosophical issue that the plague forces on all the townspeople is the issue of freedom, because It confines them and the source of the allegorical reading that gopnik pushes and that has real, textual evidence behind it is the epigraph that can be put at the front of the book, he uses a quote from Defoe says something like it’s just as reasonable to represent one type of imprisonment by another as represent anything that really exists by something that doesn’t exist. And so here, the really existing confinement of the occupation of France, was being allegorized by this plague, occupation, and what’s at stake for Kambou about the lessons of the war, the lessons of the occupation, really is fundamentally social. So at the allegorical level of reading the novel, The plague is not just some external disease, the plague is in us the plague is the possibility of radically anti human politics that might turn us against each other and set us upon one another as our own plague against each other. And I think Camus wanted to insist against Sarge in this novel, that that kind of external pressure, whether it’s from a disease or whether it’s from the social world, really does have the possibility of confining our freedom, Contra, what sort in his wartime writings had suggested.

Josh Landy
if people are reading this novel now, and I hope they do, what do you hope they do with it? How do you hope it makes them feel or react or act?

Lanier Anderson
So let me say this, the narrator insists in the final pages of the book, that telling the story of the people who suffered under this plague, is a way of insisting on and achieving a kind of humanity against the relentless inhuman force that the plague was, and thereby redeeming those he lost by manifesting the survival of that humanity. And the humanity is manifested in the objectivity that he’s able to bring to his narrative. And that reminds me of another recent discussion of the plague in the popular press. Joel Lapore wrote that, even in these times, when we’re physically isolated from each other, there’s a different kind of contact that we can have. We can establish the contact of human minds at the spiritual level through writing, through radio, through engaging with ideas. I think that’s what can you wanted us to see. And that’s what I hope people will get out of it if they read it now. In fact, I think that what Philosophy Talk is all about is establishing over the airwaves, that kind of connection of the mind. And I’d like to think that we also do that in the spirit of and in the memory of those we lost, including our friend Ken.

Josh Landy
Well, thank you so much, Lanier.

Lanier Anderson
Thank you, Josh. Thanks, Ray.

Ray Briggs
Stanford philosophe Lanier Anderson, on Albert Camus’ “The Plague”—a piece of vital reading for an age of social distancing.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about how literature and the arts can help us navigate our anxious times.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Michaela Bronstein, professor of English at Stanford and author of “Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction.” Michaela, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Michaela Bronstein
Thanks for having me. It’s nice to hear you.

Josh Landy
So Michaela, I know you have some thoughts for us about how fictional narratives can help us cope with unfolding events like this one. Can you say a little bit about that?

Michaela Bronstein
Yeah. So in late January, a friend of mine was texting with me about COVID in China. And I made an offhand comment, like, oh, but it’s not going to turn into contagion, and referring to the film contagion. And at the time, that seemed like a reasonable thing to say. And now it seems like the ironic first scene in a movie like contagion. So when we think about what fictional narratives do we think about them as an unfolding sequence of events that we try to predict what’s happening? What’s happening next? What’s going to happen to us? What genre of story? Are we in? Are we in a pandemic story? Are we in something else entirely. And that moment with my friend was a moment where I had the right genre in front of me, and I miss recognized what was happening. So the thing that I’ve been thinking about in terms of how fictional narratives help us cope with something like COVID-19 is not how they help us how fictional narratives represent plagues. But how the experience of watching a narrative happen in fiction is practice for trying to figure out what kind of real world story we’re living through.

Ray Briggs
So which fictions do you think are helpful here? Or what are some fictions that might be helpful here?

Michaela Bronstein
A play that I was teaching right before this all happened? In fact, in one of the last in person classes I had was Tony Kushner’s play a bright room called de, which is set amongst communists and left affiliating activists in early 1930s, Germany, all of them attempting to kind of figure out what the what’s what’s around the corner of history for them, which we, of course, as audience members know, is the catastrophe of the rise of Hitler. But they keep on thinking there’s a way out. And I look back on myself early in the COVID crisis is sort of disclaiming contagion as the story I was living through and feel like, oh, right, that was me. I was one of those people in the 30s in Germany, thinking, Oh, Hitler will never come to power. This is not where we’re going and not recognizing the kind of story I’m in. And I think cushions play is really interesting and how it forces you to sympathize and think through the experience of people who don’t know what’s around the next bend of history. Even as you yourself as an audience member feel constantly the pressure of history upon these people.

Ray Briggs
That play is an interesting choice because it includes an outside perspective of this character Zilla who’s a narrator who kind of comes in from like, later so the future of these 1930s characters and has her own reading on on what’s going on. Do you think she does a better job of locating them and herself in history?

Michaela Bronstein
The interesting thing about Zilla as a character is that it was really important remains very important to questioner that Zillow be up to date that Zillow be an 18th person when the play was initially going up in the 80s. And that today, when he’s rewriting the play, there’s yet another character introduced who is even more up to date living through history. So Zilla is there to represent the kind of perspective of somebody living through history that the audience doesn’t know the end of to make you recognize that you can only guess at what history’s judgment will be of your own period, and where your narrative is going.

Josh Landy
So how do we navigate our way through all these different possibilities, different story shapes?

Michaela Bronstein
I think what I would say so one of the things my students often want is for me to say something like stories help us predict the future. You know, by encountering a lot of narratives, we’ll know what’s going to happen next. And I always want to push back on that. But what I do think is that narratives do help us recognize the shapes of our own assumptions about the future. If we are acquainted with how something like contagion or something else has structured your own thinking, you can recognize the potential limitation of your thinking on that point. And the more variety of genres you have in your mind, the more likely I would hope you are to kind of recognize the multiple possible endings that await you. And of course, something like living through something like COVID, it’s, you know, you could talk about what is the shape on historical scale, you know, what kind of solution will we find what will look like for society to open up again, but also on a micro scale, right? On a daily level, this often just feels like Beckett, you know, we’re all just waiting for something to happen. So there are all these different scales of narrative experience that that happen in history, but are also something that different narratives can alert us to so that we recognize what’s happening and what we’re assuming about what will happen next.

Josh Landy
So, at least two things here first, the kind of lesson in humility, right? Don’t assume that just because you’re familiar with one kind of story, it has to follow the logic of that structure. And then another benefit, which is well, you know, maybe it helps us cope emotionally if we don’t feel like we’re just in a Beckett play, where every day, it’s the same stuff over and over again. But we can imagine the end and we can imagine ourselves as part of a total story. You know, that’s, I wonder if there’s a version of what Frank Kermode said about Apocalypse stories, right? That even if they’re scary, at least, they’re better than nothing. And certainly a story that isn’t an apocalypse story, the story of a happy ending, presumably, that’s also gives us a certain sense of psychological constellation and comfort.

Michaela Bronstein
I mean, what I think that Kushner play is really good at making you think about is that there’s a certain kind of comfort in the fact that there will be someone on the other side looking back and judging you. You know, looking back and saying, What did you do when this happened? How did you behave when history was going on? We know better about its ending then, then unit at the time. So how can we measure your actions, and that’s somewhat frightening, but it’s also somewhat comforting, because it says that even if the world that currently exists isn’t the one that goes on into the future, there will be a world that looks back and is concerned with us at a certain way.

Johnny Cash
There’s a man going around, taking names. And he decides who to free and who to blame.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re engaging in some comforting conversations with colleagues from Stanford University. We’ll hear more from Michaela Bronstein in just a minute.

Josh Landy
We’ll also think more about the value of fiction stories and storytelling in general to help us cope with anxious times—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Ray Briggs
Welcome back. I’m Ray Briggs. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy, and we’re thinking about how literature in the arts can provide comfort, connection, and a sense of common purpose.

Ray Briggs
Let’s return to our conversation with Michaela Bronstein from the Stanford English Department. And another suggested reading for these uncertain times.

Michaela Bronstein
So I’ll recommend one other one other texts that might seem a little far afield from COVID-19, which is needing Gordon Moore’s novel burgers daughter about anti apartheid activist in South Africa, which I think it’s really fascinating just because it’s full of characters who are utterly have a kind of theological belief in a post apartheid future. They believe that because of the kind of the the manifest injustice, the apartheid state, and their own revolutionary activism, they will be able to change things, and the world will be better. If not tomorrow, if not next year, someday soon. And they keep on getting things wrong about that. Right. They keep on thinking the revolution is more imminent than it actually is. They keep on thinking they know the shape of what Utopia will look like. And they actually don’t. But I think that novel is really powerful about what it means to imagine yourself as ultimately responsible for the creation of the narrative future of in history that you want, and how that changes your relations to day to day life, and often sort of demands sacrifices in the present for the sake of history.

Ray Briggs
So Michaela, I think I’m a little bit worried about how I can know any of these things about what story I’m in. If it’s not knowable, what justification do I have for picking one narrative over another?

Michaela Bronstein
I don’t think I’m advocating for picking a particular narrative over another. What I’m advocating for is a sort of alertness to the kind of assumptions everybody is likely already making, even though they don’t realize that about the kinds of narratives that they’re in different options demand different things out of you, right, we all tend to assume for the most part that we’re living in a fairly conventional realist novel in which life is going to go on. And most historical events actually won’t cause a dramatic impact in our lives personally or not. We all but a lot of people tend to think that way. And so we sort of assign certain genres like apocalyptic narratives, to the part of our mind where we think that’s an interesting thought experiment. And if we think of those genres as something that actually instead might steal it to our own daily lives, and dramatically change those lives that I think makes it easier to cope with those things when they happen. It also might lead you, for instance, to go and buy and 95 masks well in advance of the hoarding problems. Or in my case, it would have should have led me had I correctly recognized to buy flour months ago, rather than having to order a 50 pound bag online, which I indeed did last week, so I couldn’t find it in any grocery store.

Josh Landy
So I still love this idea that our experience is the kind of long term experience with reading and watching works of fiction gets us in a certain kind of mindset for understanding that stories have different shapes of different arcs. And they could turn out different ways I often think about Martin Luther King saying that the arc of history bends towards justice than Ralph Ellison’s character retorting that you know, history is really a boomerang, you better watch out. So somehow we’d better make some kind of guess. So how do we, how do we figure it out?

Michaela Bronstein
I think the tough thing about something like COVID is, there’s limit there are limited things we can do. Right, we can obey the instructions of medical professionals and experts in epidemic diseases. So in that sense, the question of knowing the genre we’re in is really a matter almost of psychological aid for ourselves, or of simply knowing whose expertise to trust. But I think a lot of historical crises are ones where knowing the potential difference in two arcs of history changes how you act in 1000 ways. So to take your king versus Ellison example, if you have in your head to firmly set the arc of history bends towards justice, maybe you think you don’t need to put any pressure on the arc of history. But if you think that history might bend towards justice, or it might boomerang back, you might think that it matters if you attempt to push the world towards justice a little more. So that’s why I think that having two possible narrative, it’s not a matter of picking the correct one, all the time, it can be a matter of picking the one you want to instill into the world. And recognizing that no outcome is inevitable. So you’re responsible for making it happen.

Ray Briggs
Michaela, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a pleasure.

Michaela Bronstein
Thank you. And thanks for asking the tough questions.

Josh Landy
Michaela Bronstein, author of “Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction.” This is Philosophy Talk. We’re thinking about fiction and storytelling as sources of comfort in anxious times.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Ato Quayson. He’s a professor of English at Stanford, a fellow of the Ghana Academy of the Arts and Sciences, and editor of “The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel. Ato, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Ato Quayson
Thank you.

Josh Landy
It’s wonderful to have you on the show today. I know you’re really interested in the culture of oral storytelling. So can you tell us a little bit about the the significance that has for you both a personal and a cultural level?

Ato Quayson
Well, in a way, and I got interested in in writing and thinking about full tools, i to the wrong side up, in the sense that it was my interest in literature and trying to earth what got me interested in literature that gradually woke me up to the stories that I had as a child. And it was almost like a reverse order. The other reverse order point that got me interested in in this rediscovering my oral storytelling youth, is an incident that occurred with my oldest daughter. So I was reading to her, you know, stories, as she was going to sleep one day out of the blue, and I have no idea why she said that it tells me a story from your head. So put the book aside and tell me a story from your head. And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell a story from my head. This was a big, you know, shock to me. And so this is then took me back to my childhood because I was surrounded by stories. And I started thinking, what are the principles of storytelling that I grew up with, that I needed to recall, to be able to tell my daughter stories from my head, and this going back then a walk in me, not just the interest in learning the skills, but the interest in storytelling in general and what they did and didn’t do.

Ray Briggs
So right now, we’re all kind of isolating from each other for sort of health reasons. And we all kind of want to stay connected. And it seems like having like adaptable stories could be really useful somehow. And I’m wondering if there’s there’s a way to make stories a source of connection and comfort right now.

Ato Quayson
Now, what has happened now is that our desire and hunger for connective stories has exponentially expanded. But in fact, the connection has always been there, but articulated in a variety of ways. Now, one of the ways of connecting this fables and oral storytelling to the conditions of today is that these stories and stories segments are the initial modes of sentimental education whose objective is to teach us how to identify with the plight of others. Think, for example, of social media, the most successful and those that get the greatest following are those that are able to formulate stories. In Instagram, there’s something that is going around now is about how authentic is your story. Now, in the present, authenticity is tied to vulnerability. So how you are able to stipulate to state your vulnerability and state your mode of overcoming that vulnerability is an index of authenticity. And the most successful actually deploying the same principles of sentimental induction into identifying with them that we found in basic form in the fable or the folktale. So yes, yes to the fact that we do need now stories more than ever before, because stories are the things that allow us to identify.

Josh Landy
So also, what kinds of stories do you think are most helpful in a time like this? I mean, I think of Boccaccio writing the Decameron right after the Black Plague hit in Italy, in the 14th century, and, and how his stories, for the most part, I don’t really about the plague, they’re doing something and maybe they’re doing exactly the kind of work that you’re talking about of cultivating our capacity to empathize and get inside somebody else’s shoes. But they aren’t necessarily directly about the plague. So what do you think? Do you think the most helpful stories right now are stories about the pandemic we’re going through? Are they stories about monkeys and lions? Or what do you think

Ato Quayson
the thing is that any stories about how people for example, the medical workers in Italy, yeah, so in many parts of Europe, the habits now in the big cities London room and so on, is to clap them in the I think this is also happening in New York, to show appreciation for the courage and bravery. However, there are other stories that may not have anything to do with the current crisis at all, but to to have the same similar impact of inducting us into sympathy. I’m thinking here for example, I’m going to teach Sophocles Philip TTC, later this afternoon. And as we know if the Philip the Sophocles is Philip TTS is precisely about the evolution or the development of fellow feeling by new autonomous Natomas. His Achilles his son, who has been sent by Odysseus to CS, Philip TTS latas has been abandoned on the island have Lemnos for 10 years, to see him and the magic bow of Heracles, the bow and arrows of haircuts so they can go and win the Trojan War. But as the play unfolds, and Neil Tomasi stratagem originally to deceive Philip Titas and seize him and take him away. The stratagem seems to be successful up to the point where Philip TTS is seized by indescribable pain, his foot, he has a very bad soul on his foot, which was this pass. He’s in deep pain, and so he collapses to the ground, moaning and screaming. There’s a collapse of language also the abrogation of the capacity to speak. It is only when the autonomous sees fuel activities in a trance and in excruciating pain, that the original purpose for seizing him, you know, is this owned. In other words, it is the encounter with the suffering of another that produces conscience. This has nothing to do with plague. But it has to do very much with a mode of identification in so many autonomous groups a conscience on seeing the suffering of Philip TT so I don’t think we should limit ourselves to plague stories, any story that will somehow in the most minimal way, fable, in a much more complex way, floaties and so on, will reveal to us the invitation or index of identification is a good thing. In this era of lockdown.

Ray Briggs
Do you have a favorite folktale that you could tell us?

Ato Quayson
Now this story, I first heard it from my father. Then the story, simply put, I’m giving you the very short version, because when he was telling it, he could expand it endlessly. The Lion King of the Jungle invites all the animals to a meeting to discuss the state of affairs in the jungle. And to all their land, their animals come and they sit in there talking. They’re making suggestions, what shall we do about this health crisis, and so on and so forth. Now, the monkey, who generally has a reputation for being overly excitable, always jumping up and down, and always has an opinion to share was uncharacteristically quiet at the meeting. It turns out that there was a very simple reason why he was quiet. And that is because the lion was seated behind the monkey and had his pole, lying very gently on the right shoulder of the monkey. And anytime the monkey, if he wanted to speak, he would feel a gentle but firm pressure exerted by the lion on his shoulder. And so, another animal set now monkey what’s going on? Man? You’re not saying anything, we haven’t had you in a while, do you have something to say? And the monkey said I actually I do have something to say I do. So what is it then, and the monkey said some are sitting comfortably, but others are not sitting comfortably at all. Now, the twist in this can only be captured in the language in which it is originally told and what the monkey says will be spoken as a bit ie not it being T Accra, but the word tab T the word T can mean both to sit and to live. So so the sentence can mean both some people are sitting well and some are not sitting well at all. Or some people are living well but others are not living well at all and booth 10 on the word t a b t and they’ve been T Accra. Now this folktale very commonly told and retool folk to is then picked up by Nana Kwame and produce band. In an aquarium Peter was a wonderful storyteller for all his songs are actually stories. And he read us this story as a song in the 1960s, just in the period when Ghana has gone through a political change of government and the rumors of the politicians stealing basically of corruption. So everyone listening to the song, immediately read into it, that it was a critique of the ruling government. And this told it didn’t take long for the phrase MBTA there’s a short form ibbity to then be transferred from the story and become a slogan on Lori’s vehicles, taxis, you know, the back of taxis on passenger vehicles. So MBTA became instill is one of the most readily recognizable and famous vehicle inscriptions ibbity and it is traceable way back to the story I heard as a child.

Josh Landy
I love this, partly because I’m a big fan of monkeys. But thank you so much for joining us today, Otto.

Ato Quayson
Thank you, George for having me.

Ray Briggs
Ato Quayson on the value of oral storytelling. You can hear the unedited version of our conversation with Ato and all our guests at our website, philosophytalk.org.

Josh Landy
And don’t forget to tune in for competent conversations part two, when we’ll be talking to Ge Wang about making music together across great distances.

Ray Briggs
And to Harry Elam about August Wilson’s great and timely pla, ” Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”

Josh Landy
We’ll also hear from Laura Whitman about a classic Italian novel set during the play.

Ray Briggs
And from Antonia Peacocke about the surprising philosophy of meditation.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University copyright 2020.

Ray Briggs
Our Executive Producer is Tina Pamintuan.

Josh Landy
The Senior Producer is Devin Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston and Lauren Schecter.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from the Partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program did not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders,

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.