Guest post: The stories people tell each other
Originally a comment by guest on What the specific demands for liberation ARE.
It seems a bit ridiculous to think the stories people tell each other in any culture DON’T influence the behaviour of those people. And don’t forget Harry Potter–I was, I think, possibly too old for it when it hit, and after reading half of the first novel gave it up as boring and derivative, but I’ve read and heard some things that make me think it would be difficult to overestimate its effect on the generation it was aimed at. I never watched the X-Files myself, but your recommendation is making me think I should check it out. It just seems a shame that the stories in our culture are, at base, designed not to teach lessons or preserve culture, traditions or history but to generate income for the tellers.
Here’s something I wrote the other day:
I went to a talk last night in which the speaker mentioned the idea that our narrative is what drives our perceptions and behaviour. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. I’ve thought (and possibly written) before about the kinds of narratives I remember from the media I consumed as a child—stories, movies, Saturday morning cartoons. Two in particular seemed to be persistent/consistent. The first was ‘when you first encounter X it’s frightening/confusing/stupid, but the more you learn about X the more you realise why X is what it is and, if not sympathise, at least understand.’ The example of this narrative that comes to my mind is the Horta in ST:TOS. But there were several stories of ‘the primitive people do X, the white rational invaders show up and say X is a backward superstition so they make people stop doing X, either by neglecting it or forcing them to give up their customs, and horrific consequences ensue.’ Moral of the story: if you don’t understand something then learn about it; every ‘other’ is a subject of its own story, every ‘irrational’ ‘primitive’ behaviour has a reason.
The second was what I call the ‘heist story’ and what a friend called the ‘D&D story’. A random group of people, from different backgrounds, with different histories and different skill sets, come together or are forced together, and each contributes something unique to the success of a project they carry out together. The example of this that comes to my mind, though it wasn’t something I encountered as a child, is Sharon Green’s ‘Blending’ novels (though I wish the two female protagonists weren’t ‘a prostitute’ and ‘a merchant’s daughter’–particularly as, in the pseudo-preindustrial England of typical Anglophone fantasy a ‘merchant’s daughter’ is basically ‘a merchant’), but any ‘quest’ story has this element. Moral of the story: every person, even a marginalised/othered person, has some value if you can find it. People succeed when they contribute to diverse groups.
So what happened to these narratives? As far as I can tell we have different ones now—it seems the most popular narrative now is the superhero story. Moral of the story: some people (a very few special people) are just naturally better than others. They may work as a team occasionally, but they are an elite team. The rest of us can only hope that these elites might do something that benefits us; we have no agency, and can only rely on the good nature and integrity of the ‘good’ elites, who will protect us from the ‘bad’ elites.
My question at the moment is which comes first, the narrative or the reality, and which drives the other?
Weren’t stories first used as ways to remember things that were important in reality? Sometimes elements of the stories were exagerrated to focus and emphasize particular things that were considered most important.
Then stories began to be more frequently employed as ways of escaping reality, and the focus and emphasis began to shift toward exagerration for titillation.
Now we seem to be headed toward a full-on-flippped-mirror-image – where every story must be defined by people who think their particular mirror is the source of all reality?
Can I really recommend ‘A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Storytellers & their World’ by the Canadian poet & cultural historian, Robert Bringhurst? The myths or stories that the Haida storytellers told (in different ways, according to their interests, insights and skills, for there was no one fixed way of telling such stories and the storytellers were very much individuals) are ways of thinking about the world, as Bringhurst makes clear, and the story tellers used myths to think about things. They were not first of all interested in preserving cultures or traditions, keeping things in memory or teaching lessons, but exploring things they were interested in through stories. Bringhurst writes about this very well.
And since I’ve been directing some recordings of Beatrix Potter’s tales recently, can I say that her wonderful stories certainly do not set out to teach lessons, but are games between the narrator and the child hearer or reader. Margaret Atwood & A.S. Byatt have written well, in differing ways, on this aspect of her tales.
I think in our (i.e. ‘WEIRD’) culture the situation with stories is the same as the situation with technologies. Thousands of men in sheds and women in kitchens (and women in sheds and men in kitchens) are right now inventing technologies–having ideas, experimenting and testing, tweaking and tinkering–to solve problems they think are worth solving. There are any number of reasons why people invent technologies. There is, however, in our culture, only one reason technologies are developed and disseminated, and that reason is to make money. If you think about it you realise why that is–developing and disseminating a technology requires money, and spending money without getting money is a quickly self-limiting exercise. So it is not possible in our culture for there to be a technology that doesn’t have the potential to make money for someone. Same with stories–nowadays anyone can put their story up on a website with minimal financial outlay, but it takes money to publish a book, record an album (do we even say albums any more?) or produce a movie or TV series, and that money has to come from somewhere, and be returned (preferably with interest) to that same somewhere. That’s the rule–and the sooner we appreciate that that’s the rule, the sooner we can devote our energy to clearly understanding our technological and mythological environment, and ponder the potential of alternatives.
@2 These stories may not set out to teach lessons, but they nevertheless are lessons. One thing we used to talk about in media classes back in my undergraduate days was the idea that while in themselves individual narratives (ads or otherwise) may not be expressing anything in particular about how the world works and how to live our lives, collectively they build up a coherent philosophy of these things which we all learn through constant repetition, and through lack of any similarly coherent and all-encompassing alternative narrative.
Yes, everything is money. It’s an easy and widely accepted thought. Which is of course why a number of good writers I know earn money by working at some job or other, often in academia, and write what they want to write and don’t make all that much out of it. Yes of course one learns from stories – all sorts of things – just as one learns from anything at all, from life in general. Advertisements as narratives that build up a coherent philosophy which we all learn through constant repetition! Yes, I have learned a lot about the cliches and techniques constantly used by advertisers – one of the techniques is of course constant repetition. The philosophy is pretty banal, and not difficult to learn. I don’t think one needs a course in media studies to understand it.