On the Endless Forms of Stories and the Diversity of Being
In his Nobel Lecture after winning the 2017 Prize in Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro described his desire to “write fiction that could work properly only on the page.” The italics were his, and it was this—his specificity in emphasising the page—that stood out to me. It made me think, delightedly, of how it mattered that a story is physically constrained to a sheet of paper.
For the longest time, I have been fascinated with how much literature is defined by its physicality; by its existence as words carved, written, painted or printed upon a physical medium. The reason for this could be because I am a biologist by training— I was drawn to genetics in particular because the concept of DNA, a language that was both essential and universal to every living being from bacteria to fungus to fish to person, was appealing to me in a way I now realise had to do with its basis in physical matter. It was thrilling to think that every organism on this planet could trace its existence to a language of just four simple physical protein compounds. That these four letters, so simple a beginning, could give rise to such vast and various forms of life.
Much like literature, I would realise nearly a decade later. All living creatures and all literature are bound by a physicality that defines and constrains them. In a way reminiscent of my time in the genetics lab, I find these nearly logistical questions delightful to think about: How is a story affected by the medium it is told on? In poetry, line breaks are deliberate and meaningful. But aren’t line lengths, to some degree, determined by the size of the page it was first written on? I think of the poems of e. e. cummings and the wonderful things he did with physical form and spacing through the manual keystrokes of his typewriter. What poets now do with ease on Microsoft Word or Google Docs. How else might physical matter affect literary content? How has literature been shaped by the physical limitations of the mediums that contain it? What has been lost or gained when scrolls gave way to paginated bound books? From pages to infinitely scrolling screens?
These questions are worth thinking about because so much of the fiction we know today exists only in a physical form. Putting aside audiobooks and oral tales, we consume stories through the filter of a physical medium— that of the page or device that holds the story, but also of our own biological bodies.
Which leads to another reason for my fascination with this: a mind cannot exist without the physical medium of the body. If that is the case, then what happens when that connection is not whole? In my case, I have never felt at home in my body, or that my body is me. “Mind over matter” is a line that I’ve been told often, yet I can never get past my belief that mind is matter. And so there is the possibility that, like all matter, it is subject to being misunderstood. The original narrative medium, after all, was the body and the spoken word.
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In my final years of university, having spent many gratifying days in the presence of a variety of animals, I realised that these animals each lived in worlds unique to them, each shaped by their unique sensory perceptions— what biology and philosophy would term the umwelt. I finally understood that the way I perceived and experienced the world was also an umwelt, one that arose from the unique variation in how my brain is wired. It encompasses everything I experience: sensory processing, social connections, coordination, perception, self- and spatial-awareness, output— everything. It is a physicality that shapes and constrains me, and I am unable to separate myself from it.
What results is a filter of unfamiliarity between what I perceive and the resulting output of my desired behaviour, like a story unfit for the physical page. There is also the sensory sensitivity, the failures of physical coordination, the quirks in executive function. But the most painful aspect is how it sometimes takes the form of an insurmountable barrier that I feel between me and others, that feels as real and as physical as a moat, or a wall. A barrier that takes real, strenuous, deliberate effort to cross.
For the longest time, every social encounter left me wanting to cry. How did I do, I would ask, as though it was a performance. It felt like it. Each time, I could not help but wonder if I had performed well enough, if I had been perceived in a way that was consistent with how I believed I had acted, if the story I had been trying to tell was being read correctly, if I had been a reliable or unreliable narrator of my own life. It was an impossible trap of my own making. If people disliked me, it was because there was, as I suspected, something fundamentally wrong with me. But if they did like me, it was for the fraudulent mask I had put on, and not my true self which I dared not show. In the presence of others, I swung between feeling like an outcast and an impostor, with nothing in between. The comfort of total seclusion was, and sometimes still is, very tempting.
But what stops me is remembering the physicality of literature. Stories and humans cannot exist in a vacuum. Just as literature cannot be divorced from the medium it exists on, it cannot exist without someone to read it. Studying literature made me realise that we must accept that readers bring a little of themselves to every story they read and that no writer can truly anticipate what their readers will take away from their stories. So with this in mind, perhaps it doesn’t matter if I am not telling mine reliably. It doesn’t matter what gets lost between the filter of my umwelt and of yours. Even as I write this to you, and even if I am writing it in a way that I hope you will understand, what you take from it is just as valid and valuable as my telling it to you.
The risk of being read wrongly hurts, but not being heard at at all is far worse.
Here I think about the unconventional stories that don’t quite fit traditional narrative structures, even though—and perhaps even because—they are bound to the physical page: the non-linear narratives, nested frame tales, unreliable narrators, epistolary novels, stories that make use of paratexts, unfamiliar points of view. There is something soothing about their diversity. These stories, in their endless forms so beautiful and so wonderful, make you sit up, notice their differences, how they and try to understand what they are trying to say within all the constraints of their physicality and being.
26 March 2026