Storytelling in a modern world
We humans are all storytellers, or story-listeners, or both. That's a crucial element of our humanity. Passing down the generations, constantly changing under the pressure of altering circumstances, stories link humanity together in chains of narrative. Odysseus sets out on the wine-dark sea, fights ferocious monsters, endures endless hardships, and eventually finds his way home; and so does Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried; and so do many thousands of other heroes conceived in the 2,900 years between Odysseus and O'Brien. 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,
Those who spend long hours reading stories to their children are clearly on the right track-and so is the child who demands the same story over and over again. In one sense, Freud ended the 20th century as a failure: armies of analysts and theorists can now demonstrate that he often exaggerated his results, that he failed to understand what some of his patients were telling him (about sexual abuse, for instance), that his rate of helping patients get better was not high, and that there is no way (nor will there ever be a way) to prove his theories by anything remotely like a scientific method. Earlier centuries heard stories face-to-face, figured them out from pictures on the walls of caves or cathedrals, read them in manuscripts, and finally (from the 15th century onward) read them in printed books. Stories are the forces that set these neurons firing and connecting, and the connections that result become the architecture of human intelligence. But there is a danger in this swell of story-telling. There was a time when the story-teller was revered. Stories teach the brain how to work. Now, they are installed as constant elements in our lives, delivered through movies, radio, television and the Internet, all of them machines of narrative. The stories which do not get told in Hollywood, at least, they rarely get told. 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. In the sciences of the mind there is something even more compelling to be said about narrative: Sigmund Freud became the most influential thinker of the century because he told effective stories, and retold the stories of others in ways that elaborated on his own patterns of thought. Boys lost their innocence, lost their lives, and the country was split down the middle because of it. I used to read The Chronicles of Narnia until I wore the pages out, and I've already burned through four copies of Shogun.
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,
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Acceptance Essays
