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At the very least, it would appear that narrative provides us with the opportunity to expand our knowledge of human nature and the conditions that constrain it, both universal and local. –Michelle Scalise Sugiyama
The titles of the essays in The Literary Animal, compiled by Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, can seem laughably obtuse: Proper Hero Dads and Dark Hero Cads: Alternate Mating Strategies Exemplified in British Romantic Literature or Quantitative Literary Study: A Modest Manifesto and Testing the Hypothesss of Feminist Fairy Tale Studies. But despite some occasionally thick language, the question that the book is trying to answer can be very simply stated: why do we tell stories?
The Literary Animal had been on my shelf for some time before I went to go see the show Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell, now playing at New York's Minetta Lane Theatre. I bought the book sometime last year after reading a review of it in Nature Magazine and thought it sounded like an interesting collection and hoped it might explain to me my own urge to write. But the thing that made me pick it up again, upon hearing Gray's stories being retold, was the sense that, for the audience, his work, his public narration of his own life over the years, served a larger purpose than simply entertaining or waxing therapeutic. He, along with every other writer, performer, comedian or storyteller, was repeating an ancient rite that began long before him and will, no doubt, continue on as long as we humans are alive.
Born in Barrington, Rhode Island on June 5th, 1941, Spalding Gray spent most of his childhood there, along with his parents and his two brothers. Throughout his childhood his mother suffered from severe depression and when Gray was in his early twenties, she committed suicide. His relationship with his mother and her eventual death are recurring themes throughout his work, as is his curiosity about and intermittently dark and humorous perspective on the world. After spending his undergraduate years at Emerson College he went on to work in film and in experimental theatre, where he eventually began to shape the first of his monologues for performance.
Gray performed his first monologue, Sex and Death at the Age of 14, in 1979 with the Wooster Group in New York City, which he co-founded two years earlier.  Over the years he developed and performed in number of other monologues, including Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box (both later made into films), as well as It's a Slippery Slope, Morning, Noon and Night, and others. His monologues were always based on his own life experience and he copiously recorded and tested each one before audiences in lengthy workshop periods where he would hone or flesh out different parts of each performance in order to achieve just the right effect. The staging for the shows was always the same, regardless of the venue or the progression of his career: a simple table, a glass of water, and a notebook. He would sit at this table for anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours, recounting the ins and outs of his life in a long one-sided conversation with the audience. After surviving a bad car accident in 2001, Gray suffered a number of injuries, including brain damage to his frontal lobe. In the three years to follow he fell into a deep depression which ended with his suicide in 2004.
Audiences came to know Gray simply by going to see his shows. They became familiar with his thought-patterns and understanding of the world by listening to him speak. And the audience's identification with him seems to have stemmed largely from his openness and the inventiveness of his stories. Though much of what he described has happened to other people in the world, it was the way in which he told it that brought the experience into a focus and, at its best, gave listeners a new or enriched understanding of the world. It's this ability to give new meaning to experience that seems to be the unique power of the storyteller.
Mark Russell, the longtime artistic and executive director of P.S. 122, speaks about the value of Gray's work imparting new meaning in a eulogy he gave at a memorial service for Gray. In his speech Russell touched on the events of September 11, 2001: "I needed Spalding to walk me through that one. I was counting on him to tell his part of the story, make sense of it, find truth in it and help me…reconnect with the journeys we started before that day."
It was Russell's words in particular, printed in the latest edition of Gray's Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue, that drew me back to The Literary Animal. In among the essays I saw sentiments like Russell's repeated over and again as proof that storytelling serves a deeply important role in human life. "The folklore of contemporary foragers suggests that, indeed, narrative enables people to acquire information, rehearse strategies, or refine skills that are instrumental in surmounting real-life difficulties and dangers." This last sentence comes from the essay by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama featured in The Literary Animal (also quoted at the top of the article).
In an overview of Darwinian literary theory for The Literary Animal, Joseph Carroll elucidates the relationship between our 'life histories,' as he terms them, and the varying narrative structures, tones and styles of literature. He first lays out the basic characteristics of human interaction—our highly social nature, our two-person mating, our prolonged childhood and the required commitments and responsibilities of parents during that period. Then he seeks to demonstrates the ways in which narrative serves to promote and sustain these characteristics, primarily by allowing us to learn from others, particularly our parents, who are the first to save us from having to learn all we know by direct experience. From his essay it becomes clear that stories are primarily a means of imparting information—not always factual, correct, or universally agreed upon, but information nonetheless.
Spalding Gray was and was not the man on stage. As he crafted the text so too did he craft the individual it represented—closely related to the man offstage, but not a complete person, a creative act that supercedes its relationship to truth. The crafting was conscious, and quite often clear to the audience (his writing is frequently self-reflexive). But the elements of invention and selection, combined with his unique perspective on the scenarios he described, made his work distinctive. He was a skilled storyteller and would go out of his way to find good stories to tell—purposely getting lost in familiar cities, learning to ski late in life, eagerly engaging in conversations with strangers. In that same skill of invention was also the ability to communicate meaning, a key component, according to Carroll, of any work of literature. And it was this ability to find meaning in a sometimes nonsensical life that Mark Russell found himself wanting when he spoke at Gray's memorial. While there is, no doubt, a great deal of debate yet to have about Darwinian literary theory and the relationship of narrative to human evolution, what is apparent in the work of Spalding Gray and people's reactions to it, is that a story well told imparts some new and lasting information to the audience. The production of Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell, a collection of excerpts from Gray's monologues and journals read by a rotating group of actors and guests, is a poignant and somewhat bittersweet reminder of the power of a story well told. Conceived of by his second wife, Kathie Russo and directed by Lucy Sexton, the piece covers much of the terrain of his life, putting each individual story into a larger narrative that shaped his character. It is both an homage and a recognition of one man's attempt to make sense of his own life through the stories that he told about it.
Cover photo - Ain Gordon in Spalding Gray: Stories Left To Tell
© Richard Termine
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