My last post claims that storytelling is a fundamental trait of the human mind, developed for the primary purpose of making sense of the world for ourselves individually and for others socially. Stories are at times intentionally fictive confabulations, but mostly they are non-fictive confabulations; however, they are always confabulations. As neurologist Pria Anand says, confabulation is a mostly subconscious survival tool working hard for us to bridge the gaps in our knowledge. For example, confabulation takes seven basic stars found year-round in the Northern hemisphere and creates Ursa Major, or The Big Dipper, to fill-in the gaps between the stars and to make sense of them.
Of course, Big Bear comes to us from an ancient Greek story in which Zeus turns the nymph Callisto into a bear to protect her, later placing her in the sky, but if we are curious, we learn that almost every culture that could see Ursa Major developed a unique story for the same seven stars, seeing everything from a bear to a funeral procession (Arab) to a celestial parrot (Mayan) to caribou (Inuit) and more. Slaves in the old American South confabulated a story of the "Drinking Gourd" and used it as a secret code and for navigation along the Underground Railroad. Even when we are guided by a rigorous scientific process, we still are faced with the problem of bridging the gaps within a limited data set to make sense of whatever bit of reality we are investigating. And there are always gaps, so we confabulate multiverses, dark energy, dark matter, and big bangs. We live in a really big universe now, so we need really big confabulations, really big stories, that outstrip any story about Zeus.
So: seven shared, verifiable, reliable facts (points of light in the night sky), and a hundred different stories and truths to explain them. This drive to confabulate explains to me much of the confusion I have struggled with since 2016 about why my dear friends and family have joined millions of other Americans to support Trump and MAGA. Didn't they see the facts, especially after I so meticulously pointed them out: the graft, the grift, the lying, the treachery, the narcissism? They did, but they filtered those facts, like the seven stars of Ursa Major, through different narratives to yield very different truths that they live by. Of course, I have done the same thing. My truth about Trump and MAGA depend as much on my confabulations as theirs do. To my mind, then, confabulations are unavoidable if we are to maintain a coherent worldview.
However, when our stories become inconsistent or dissonant, we suffer, because as Anand notes, stories or confabulations help constitute our identity. Thus, we are loathe to change them. Almost all of us have some stories that we would sooner die than relinquish. It seems that giving up our stories is often worse than death, and our minds resist changing stories with everything we've got. The necessity of narrative, then, is a foundational principle of rhizoNarratology. I begin with narrative as a fundamental strategy for understanding ourselves and our world.
This in no way means that I think reality is merely whatever we make of it, that it is subjective. Reality is objective, existing as it is regardless of the stories we tell ourselves, and reality has a way of rearranging our stories, sometimes brutally, if our stories are too inconsistent with it. However, I think we factually see very little of what objectively exists due to the limitations of our human faculties, and thus, we make up, confabulate, much of what we believe about reality. Like our AI chatbots, we will hallucinate made up stories with made up facts and figures to support whatever we believe. We have to create models of reality to make our ways through life, and stories are the most common tool we use to create those models. Still, as George Box claims: all models are wrong, but some are useful. So I assume that despite their limitations stories are quite important to us all and that I will benefit from understanding them better.
In an attempt to understand stories better, I have come to think of them as complex systems. Hence, RhizoNarratology. I am aware of a long, rich conversation about narratives and storytelling, both as rhetoric and poetic, starting back with the ancient Greeks, and indeed, much of my professional career in education has been informed by that tradition, but complexity theory has afforded me different ways of thinking about narratives that I want to explore. I make no claims about saying something new, given that I have not read all that is available about either narrative or complexity, and I certainly don't have the background in science and math to understand many of the things that I have read about complexity, but I am able to see and to say things about story that excite and engage me here at the end of my professional career.
Complexity itself is a very rich and complex conversation that is difficult to define, as many of its scientific practitioners have noted, so I'll begin with a metaphor from Deleuze and Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus (English translation, 1980). In the first chapter, they introduce the concept of rhizomatic structures, modelled loosely on biological rhizomes and contrasted with arborescent structures, modelled loosely on trees. I've discussed Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome in this blog many times before, and I won't repeat that argument here, but I should note that the term I'm using for narrative as a complex structure is RhizoNarratology, drawn directly from Deleuze and Guattari.
Their discussion of the rhizome and how it works was transformational for me, but I soon moved on to reading about networks, then systems, and finally complexity, first in physics, then biology, and eventually in social structures. When I began to explore the stories we Americans were telling about Trump, I realized that complexity had something valuable to say to me about narratives that was consistent with rhizomatic thought. Over the past year, I have collected over 150 works about complexity, mostly in the sciences, and I have used AI (Google's NotebookLM) to probe those works and organize the different ideas they present. I'm attempting here to apply complexity to narratives.
I begin with my current thoughts about what complex systems are and how they are different from our dominant reductionist view of narratives. To understand what a complex system is, I find it helpful first to understand what it is not. A helpful rule of thumb is to distinguish between a system that is merely complicated and one that is truly complex. Probably lots of people have made this distinction, but I borrow the idea from Dave Snowden and his Cynefin framework.
A jumbo jet, a CD player, or a mechanical watch are complicated systems. They consist of thousands of intricate parts, but their behavior is entirely predictable. If you take a watch apart, you can understand exactly how it works by examining its individual gears, and if you put it back together, it will run exactly as it did before. In a complicated system, the whole thing is exactly equal to the sum of its parts.
A complex system, on the other hand, is more like a human family, an economy, a rainforest, or a frog. It is a system composed of many diverse, autonomous parts that constantly interact with one another and with their environment. In a complex system, you cannot understand the whole by simply taking it apart and looking at the pieces in isolation. Because the parts are richly interconnected, their interactions give rise to novel, unpredictable behaviors that take on a life of their own. In complexity science, the defining motto is that the whole thing is qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. As complexity thinker Edgar Morin notes, sometimes the whole is more than the sum of its parts and sometimes it is less than the sum of its parts. Unlike a mechanically complicated watch, you can't take apart an organically complex frog to examine its individual parts and how they work together and then put it back together, expecting it to operate as before. It won't, even though the frog is now exactly equal to the sum of its parts. Something will be missing, and the frog will be dead.
I am in no way suggesting that we humans gain no useful insight into the nature of frogs by disassembling, or dissecting, them. We do. But in the process, we kill the frog, and lose the very qualities that made the frog interesting to begin with. In the long run, the qualities that we lose turn out to be the most important qualities. Complexity tries to reclaim those qualities.
I think we have often used this same reductionism to understand stories: cutting them up into their various parts to see how the blood circulates. We do learn some things, but in the end, we kill the story. When I was learning to read stories in the 70s and 80s, New Criticism was still a significant mode of criticism, and by limiting the scope of literary criticism to the thing itself, to the poem or novel, the New Critics assumed that a poem or novel was like a watch: exactly equal to the sum of its parts. And like a skillful jeweler, they would break a poem into its parts to see how they were connected and worked together. Of course, you can learn much about a poem, story, or play by reading I. A. Richards, William Empson, or Cleanth Brooks, among others, but too often, I was left with a poem in pieces, categorized and calculated, and impersonal, isolated from an author (no intentional fallacies), a reader (no affective fallacies), or a historical context, and in short, devoid of any life. A dead poem is hardly any poem at all.
Fortunately, reader-response, feminist, post-colonial, and other theories saved us from the reductionism of New Criticism. To my mind, these theories worked in large part because they reopened the text to its context: its writer, its reader, its wider historical and social environments. Complex systems are radically open to their environments. They must constantly absorb energy, information, and "noise" from the outside world to adapt, learn, and survive.
We can see this openness certainly in science. An ecosystem or a living biological cell is an open system, constantly exchanging energy, matter, information, and organization with its surroundings. If an ecosystem becomes completely closed off from the outside world, it reaches a state of total equilibrium, exactly equal to the sum of its parts. In biological terms, complete equilibrium means death. A cell, frog, rainforest, city, or solar system requires the dynamic tension of the environment to continually self-organize and evolve.
The same is true of literary works – well, of all artistic works, but I'm focusing on stories here. A novel like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1885) acts as a living, open complex system. Huckleberry Finn is not a static object; it is an "on-going linguistic formulation" (Richardson and Cilliers, 2001) that is created in the moment of telling and reading, retelling and rereading. When you read Huckleberry Finn, your mind interacts with the text's diverse "tesserae"—its historical context, its moral paradoxes, and its dialects. The story's meaning adapts and evolves as it encounters new generations of readers. If a narrative becomes a closed system, then it loses its complexity and effectively dies as a cultural force. If it is rigidly interpreted in only one way, losing its ambiguity and its connection to the shifting human experience, then it is entombed in the sepulchre of stacks in a university library, its ghost becoming evermore faint. I suspect that few today have read Dimplethorpe (1880) by Eliza Tabor Stephenson, quite alive at the same time as Huckleberry Finn, now mostly dead.
Ultimately, understanding complexity means shifting our worldview. Instead of seeing the world as a giant, predictable clockwork mechanism that can be mastered by breaking it into pieces, complexity science asks us to view the world as a dense, living web of relationships. Whether we are looking at the neurons in our heads, the global economy, or the stories we use to make sense of our lives, the magic lies not in the parts themselves, but in how those parts connect and interact with each other and with their environments.
