Introduction

According to the stories my mother tells, I refused to speak a word until I was almost four. She became so worried that she took me to a doctor -- an extreme act in the rural Kentucky region where I was raised; in fact, for the remainder of my Kentucky youth, I would never see another M.D. but go to the local chiropractor when I was ill. The doctor advised her that there was nothing wrong with me physically, that I was merely stubborn and preferred grunting over speech out of some willful streak of perversity. In all of my mother's future stories, the adjectives "stubborn" and "willful" would serve as euphemisms for "stupid," a term she was too polite to use. I embraced stupidity for a long time, refusing to talk although I was capable of it.

When I finally did speak, my words were arranged in sentences. Sometimes my mother says my first utterance was "Daddy made a boo-boo." In unguarded moments, she confesses that my actual first words might have been "Smoke Kools." There is something in both sentences, it seems to me, that is quintessentially American, which is in some circles, I know, yet another euphemism for "stupid."

My own children could not have been more different from me. They were eager and brilliant in their adoption of language. They mimicked sounds early and often, and then, around the age of two, they suddenly realized they didn't have to wade through words. They discovered they could swim. Each unhesitantly took the plunge, and their ability to comprehend and use language became abruptly more complex.

As I understand it, virtually every child goes through this developmental stage at roughly the same age, regardless of intelligence, race, sex, class, or nationality. The acquisition of language follows a pattern that has little to do with the particular dialect or culture or even the individual child, and everything to do with the evolutionary status of homo sapiens. Even children who refuse to speak, as I did, acquire language at the same age as the others. The syntax necessary for language is an integral part of humans at birth. The folks who seriously study this business argue that language is "hard-wired" in the brain, and a child need only be exposed to speech at the right developmental stages for the acquisition to occur, which is then followed by the ability to embrace increasingly abstract concepts.

I've known a number of people, though, whose ability to think in the abstract seemed somewhat below the low end of the normal range. Some were, in fact, retarded, and I worked with them as a counselor (my job before becoming a writer). Others were more or less normally functioning people, those humorless and persistent types who corner you at parties (without understanding the meaning of "to corner") and relentlessly count away at the events of their lives (or their afternoon) without coming to what we might impolitely call "a point," or to that other, more desirable type of conclusion that signifies one has heard a story. Often they are conspiracy buffs, the notion of conspiracy denoting the apogee of their ability to think abstractly. They can provide a multitude of facts about the Trilateral Commission, but terms such as "opinion," "joke," and "coincidence" baffle them; which is to say, make them suspicious. Ultimately they must be told, "The party is over. Go home." In their defense, they take no
affront from being told to leave. Why should they?

I think of popular conspiracy stories as rudimentary narratives because all effects have a single cause. While this has a certain kind of appeal -- that of tidiness, if nothing else -- it lacks the power of more sophisticated narratives. The ability to comprehend and create complex narratives requires one to conceive of abstractions and sequences, and to connect events in terms of cause and effect. Typically, it requires something like compassion, and often, I would argue, the ability to hold contradictory ideas simultaneously.

Some of the most complex narratives, of course, are those involved in successful works of fiction. Such narratives, for both the speaker and the listener, become a way of thinking, a means of discovering what one already knows but had been unable to otherwise express. It is this sense of discovery that writers often talk about at great length, saying how the whole story seemed to exist in their head before they ever put pen to paper. It fits, to my way of thinking, with the model of pre-wired ability; that is, if one's capacity to comprehend and create narrative is hard-wired, then it would make sense that the experience of creating a narrative would feel like discovering something you, in some way, already knew.

As I said, for my children, it was at about the age of two when their use of language passed into a more complex realm. They began to rely on it more heavily, and, perhaps more significant, they began to sense its possibilities. But it was no match for their desires. Temper tantrums ensued as they tried and failed, again and again, to explain what it was that they wanted. I can remember my son in the kitchen, stomping his feet and demanding, over and over, "The other one," while my wife and I hurried about looking for the elusive other. The "terrible twos," as the age is known in toddler vernacular, has, I think, lexical origins. What children of that age wish to convey may be as simple as the desire to be held and comforted, but their vocabularies betray them.

Little do they know that this problem will stay with them for the remainder of their lives. Their ability to express themselves will be constantly outstripped by their increasingly mysterious and fugitive desires. Just the other day, my son, now five, asked me, "How does Mother Nature get a Band-Aid?" He was frustrated by my inability to figure out just what it was he wanted to know, and he could formulate no better description of his desire. He tells me that he knows what he wants to be when he grows up, but he doesn't know the name for it. He's not sure there is a name for it.

To attempt to fully name one's desires is, I think, one of the primary reasons that people write stories.
This is the story of a man whose heart is breaking, the author writes. There is no need to add,
And I desperately need you to hear it. Great stories are measured not only by the eloquence and accuracy of desire's expression, but by the magnitude of the desire. It is often this magnitude that separates literature from entertainments, that determines what is serious and what is fluff. There are many beautifully written entertainments, as well as awkward masterpieces of literature. D. H. Lawrence, for all his embarrassing moments, is a literary writer who will endure because of the magnitude of his desire. Mark Twain is another. Intellectually speaking, one may point to Flannery O'Connor's narrowness of scope, but the greatness of her stories makes such criticism seem petty; they seek, after all, to save the reader's soul.

Of course, one cannot really label the desires of the great writers without diminishing them, although it's fair, I think, to say that John Updike's has something to do with human sexuality, and Alice Munro's has to do with personal and collective history, and Toni Morrison's has to do with freedom and responsibility, and so on. To pin them down too much is to deny the stories themselves.

A few years back, at the house of friends, my wife and I watched with our hosts while our daughter, who was five, played with an assortment of blocks and toys. She created a community of buildings, people, and animals. Her play was intense and entirely absorbing. For hours, she played in the dining room doorway while we adults talked and observed. Then our son, just two years old at that time, came bolting through the doorway and knocked everything over. Our daughter burst into tears. Because we adults had been studying her play, we were able to reconstruct the community for her very precisely, but she was not satisfied with it. "It's not the same," she cried. Of course she was right. She had been creating a story and inhabiting its world. In place of that world, we could offer only blocks and toys, a reconstruction of what was merely correct.

Children who are taken away by their play are almost always deep in a narrative, and that narrative, too, grows from the expression of desire. For my daughter, it was then and is now a desire that has to do with harmony and something like equality between humans and animals. She daily works to construct and reconstruct its telling.

One could argue that the ability to tell complex stories and appreciate them has given humans a significant edge over other animals. A tiny portion of the human population lacks this talent. I am told there is a type of autism that has as a central characteristic the inability to comprehend narratives. This rare disorder is thoroughly devastating, as one might well imagine.

That the narrative knack can be separated from other activities of the mind suggests -- to me, anyway -- that it has indeed been selected for, that it is the product of countless years of evolution. This may help explain the pleasure one takes from good fiction, a pleasure that is much more than merely intellectual, a pleasure that connects with the hard-wired instinct for story. The human spirit, if it does not originate from a god, may well reside in this generational longing that is both the product and residue of natural selection.

All of which is to say, a good story is the best way I know to touch upon the spiritual, to ride the elusive circuitry of the soul. The extent to which stories connected for me with that deep and satisfying yearning has been my fundamental criterion of selection for this issue.