By the way, Pica, criticism is just that communal dining room table on which we pile our stories about stories! Isn't it?

"Should we always make it clear whether we are telling stories or not?" I should hope not. It's your task as a literary critic to ascertain the genres (e.g. truth or fiction) that a text moves in, and to guide us poor nature-lovers to recognize just a few of the animal tracks we need to know whether we're in danger. [Block that metaphor! —Ed.]

Anyway, to me "story-telling" is an effect of writing that should be deployed whether you're making up the story or telling one that you fully believe. "Story-telling" is organizing events to emphasize the central thread, and go lightly on the side-plots, thus to keep it interesting—and that's as important in truth as in fiction. I don't want to read criticism that reads like a table of census data.

That was the climax, as far as India admits of one. The rain settled in steadily to do its job of wetting everybody and everything through, and soon spoiled the cloth of gold on the palanquin and the costly disc-shaped banners. Some of the torches went out, fireworks didn't catch, there began to be less singing, and the tray returned to Professor Godbole, who picked up a fragment of the mud adhering and smeared it on his forehead without much ceremony. Whatever had happened had happened, and while the intruders picked themselves up the crowds of Hindus began a desultory move back into the town. The image went back too, and on the following day underwent a private death of its own, when some curtains of magenta and green were lowered in front of the dynastic shrine. The singing went on even longer... ragged edges of religion... unsatisfactory and undramatic tangles... 'God is love.' Looking back on the great blur of the last twenty-four hours, no man could say where was the emotional centre of it, any more than he could locate the heart of a cloud.
(A Passage to India, E. M. Forster)

They sang not even to the God who confronted them, but to a saint; they did not one thing which the non-Hindu would feel dramatically correct.
(ibid.)