Why Everybody Loves a Story : THE CALL OF STORIES : Teaching and the Moral Imagination <i> by Robert Coles (Houghton Mifflin: $17.95; 205 pp.)</i>

Years ago in Torino, in the middle of a heated discussion, an Italian professor turned to me and started to summarize the abstract nature of the problem we were exercising. He stopped himself mid-phrase, changed course, and said: “Let me give you an example instead.” Then he stopped himself again, to add: “Because isn’t life, after all, just an example?” I’ve used that story in literature classes ever since as the most succinct apologia for the study of narrative--that treasury of examples created by human experience too rich and too unique to be reduced to theory.

Robert Coles’ “The Call of Stories” is not only a noted teacher/professor/psychiatrist’s testimony to the therapeutic and diagnostic power of literature but also a provocative exploration of the narrative strategies of storytelling by which we all weave our daily organizing accounts of reality: past rationalization, present perspective, and future fantasy. Just as the great writers Coles evokes have provided us with the cultural myths Joseph Campbell called “public dream,” each individual lives in his own private, evolving dream, expressed in the stories he exchanges with those he encounters.

Coles came late to literature, after rebelling against his mother and father’s daily practice of reading the novels of Hardy, Eliot, Dickens and Tolstoy aloud to each other while he and his brother lobbied for the radio. His father called books “reservoirs of wisdom.” It took the corroboration of other “fathers,” his medical school mentors--and teachers, associates, and patients like Perry Miller, William Carlos Williams, Enrico Fermi, the poet L. E. Sissman, and Coles’ schoolteacher wife--to lead Coles to explore the psychological breakthroughs that could be made using story rather than analysis as the basis of communication. He began teaching his freshman seminars at Harvard (where he is professor of psychiatry and medical humanities) with James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” and George Orwell rather than with sociological texts.

In “The Call of Stories,” Coles compiles conversations with his students “over many years in many classrooms”--as well as experiences in the civil rights movement and from his child psychiatry practice--”edited and shaped” for the doctor or teacher who might apply this exemplary manual to his own encounters in classrooms, clinics or wards. One of Coles’ medical school mentors told him: “The people who come to see us bring us their stories. They hope they tell them well enough so that we understand the truth of their lives. They hope we know how to interpret their stories correctly. We have to remember that what we hear is their story.”

The role of the listener in the fabrication of the story is a keynote in Coles’ anthological essay. He learned to listen for the story teller’s narrative strategy: “Remember, what you are hearing (from the patient) is to some considerable extent a function of you, hearing . . . . As active listeners, we give shape to what we hear, make over their stories into something of our own.” Patients and students sensitive to what we want of them--including how quickly we want to deal with them--often ally with the professional listener in doing themselves a disservice. My intuition of a student’s problems is mine, not necessarily hers; and she may respond to my intuition because her need for a sympathetic ear leads her to intuit my view and tell her story to fit my requirements. William Carlos Williams told Coles: “We owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.” The warning is well-taken: First, listen.

“No question: The farther one climbs the ladder of medical education, the less time one has for relaxed, storytelling reflection. And patients’ health may be jeopardized because of it: Patients’ true concerns and complaints may be overlooked as the doctor hurries to fashion a diagnosis, a procedural plan.” Coles notes that a second opinion is often sought by patients because they feel they haven’t been “heard” by the first doctor.

Our stories are as important to us individuals as their literary models are to our culture. “The beauty of a good story,” Coles says, “is its openness--the way you or I or anyone reading it can take it in, and use it for ourselves.” Describing literature as an act of active communication between reader and text is, of course, a well-known literary theory. But the immediacy of Coles’ practical discovery makes his book important for all those who have little use for literary theory.

Coles helps us realize the ways in which storytelling is, as counterpart to sex, our primary method of communication--and that it is an exchange: The man who tells a joke incites another from his victim; you read a good book, you want to share it with a friend. “Novels and stories are renderings of life; they can not only keep us company, but admonish us, point us in new directions, or give us the courage to stay a given course . . . offer us other eyes through which we might see, other ears with which we might make soundings.”

Those drawn to literature because they find no solace in limitation will discover Coles’ book a resounding confirmation. It might well be smuggled into literature class to remind us that the most valuable axiom of criticism was inscribed above the oracle at Delphi: “Know thyself.” Those who think the shape of the mind can be rendered abstractly will find the book a caveat. The good mind--like the good book--has no shape except that which it tells itself it has. To deal with the mind truly is to listen to its story.