Storytelling in a modern world

Storytelling has been, since the earliest times, the way people have ordered their reality. It is the fundamental use of language, that which creates and defines reality. As James Baldwin said in his essay, If Black Language Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me What Is?, “People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. . .What joins all languages, and all men [sic], is the necessity to confront life, in order, not inconceivably, to outwit death” (37). Baldwin’s understanding of the use of language can be extended to the purpose of storytelling. By telling a story,

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It was the memory, the souls of those who fought the war. Stories teach the brain how to work. The 20th century made stories pervasive. Rational capacities depend upon it" (37). He believes that storytelling is our chief means of explaining the world to one another and ourselves, and the principal way we form intelligence. Story-tellers were considered to be prophets, shamans, visionaries.

We might have expected that humanity would at some point have resisted this swelling ocean of stories, would have been repelled by so much narration, so many ingenious plots, so many satisfying resolutions. I used to read The Chronicles of Narnia until I wore the pages out, and I’ve already burned through four copies of Shogun. In Narrative Means To Therapeutic Ends, by Michael White and David Epston, the same ideas of storytelling are enumerated, “In striving to make sense of life, persons face the task of arranging their experiences of events in sequences across time in such a way as to arrive at a coherent account of themselves and the world around them. Boys lost their innocence, lost their lives, and the country was split down the middle because of it. A neural path is being carved through the mind; perhaps the child gets it right by instinct. The outcasts, like Thomas Builds-the-Fire in Sherman Alexie’s novel, The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven, are telling the stories of the dispossessed. So far, no one claims excellence for literary experiments on the Internet-but then, the novel at its birth was thought to be frivolous and the movies, when new, were no more than a toy.

Common topics in this essay:
David Epston, Sigmund Freud, Ranger Tonto, Gerald Edelman, Tell People, Vietnam War, Modern World, Literary Mind, Charles Dickens, Chronicles Narnia, telling stories, 20th century,

Approximate Word count = 1107
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

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