Yesterday at a (child’s) birthday party someone asked person A about how he came to know person B. He told us he’d taken a trip to Paris, and on the aeroplane he happened to strike up a conversation with someone else, C. They became friends that way, and then much later when he was meeting person C at a pub, person B, who was also friends with person C, was there, and that’s how they met.
Now, that’s a perfectly reasonable answer, but I remarked that he could just have said “Oh, we met via a mutual friend, C.” This prompted a rather lengthy and probably pointless discussion about the right way to give answers, and whether there’s an essential difference between answering questions and telling stories.
I have rather strong instincts about this sort of thing, and with regards to reciprocal communication, ie. not storytelling, was convinced by what I was taught in a linguistics course on pragmatics, namely that successful communication is characterised by adherence to certain cooperative maxims. These are often called Gricean maxims, after Paul Grice, and are in simplified form:
1. Say things you believe to be true and have evidence for
2. Give enough information, but not more than that
3. Be relevant
4. Be clear and easy to understand, avoiding unclear expressions, ambiguity, out-of-order chronology etc.
So I was exercised by the irrelevant addition of the trip to Paris and how A and C met. Of course, it’s not easy to say exactly where the line is. Even C’s identity is not really relevant, but had it been omitted (“We met via a mutual friend”), it would probably seem to be too little information, prompting “Oh, which friend?”
A argued that including the information about the plane trip was natural, because it closes the circle: there was no further person who introduced A and C, and therefore curiosity is satisfied. Also, from a storytelling point of view, it is somewhat unusual to meet someone spontaneously like that, so why not add it.
Of course, usually there *is* a further person D who made the connection, and it would be unreasonable to include information about that, and about how A and D and C and D met etc.
Now, what is the storytelling point of view? Arguably, since we were in a social setting, the storytelling frame is always available, since we’re really mostly trying to entertain each other rather than transmit information efficiently. In a workplace situation, you’re not supposed to start telling stories, because that’s wasting time. Perhaps the storytelling maxims are:
1. Say things you believe to be true and have evidence for, except if it’s more entertaining otherwise
2. Give enough information, but not more than that, except if it’s more entertaining otherwise
3. Be relevant, except if it’s more entertaining otherwise
4. Be clear and easy to understand, avoiding unclear expressions, ambiguity, out-of-order chronology etc. except if it’s more entertaining otherwise
I think for some people (perhaps those people who are known as “storytellers”), that’s really how it is.
In a conversation, it’s implied that communication should be most relevant to the most recent thing the other person has said. It’s a kind of back-and-forth of adjusting the topic from one message to the next. This is supported by the way a person will sometimes explicitly break this principle: “I’ll get back to that, but just let me tell you about…” In storytelling, the storyteller decides to take up the right to determine relevance himself. In his mind there is some central idea behind the story, not immediately known to everyone else, so he can break the rules, but hopefully come around to completing the story into an internally relevant whole.
When storytelling happens in the middle of conversation, people are very aware of it. “Ah, he’s stopped the conversation to tell a story.” This is considered to be quite a responsibility. If the storyteller fails to tie up the story in some interesting way or to be entertaining, he will very quickly come to be seen as a bore, in a much worse way than just generally failing to be interesting in his replies to question in the normal course of conversation.
