Why Story?
Narratives--stories--are powerful things. They offer us solace by delineating reality; they fence-in the chaos of our lives and permit us the ability to explain what is, essentially, inexplicable. Stories like these, the ones that explain the grand structure of our lives, are often called Myths. Myths that you might know as such explain why rainbows exist, why there is evil in the world, where babies come from. They are the most important stories because they give our lives order.
Smaller myths exist as well. These quotidian myths are no less compelling just because they lack the dignity of a capital letter. They explain the everyday--why is that person poor? Why do those groups of people hate us? Or why do we hate them? Ten thousand . . . a million more. How you choose to answer those questions reveals much about you, but as likely as not, you explained your answer in the terms of narrative. That person is poor because of some other external event. That's the power of narrative, for every action there is a cause. And a preceding cause, and a whole chain of them ad infinitum.
The Power of Story
As stories are re-told, though, something about their character changes. Instead of explaining the world--depicting how something is--they metamorphose into how people ought to react to the world. Once you've heard a certain number of times how your forebears reacted to an event, you begin to imagine yourself in that same position. How would you respond? Likely, you would respond the same way that those people did in the stories that you've been told.
This is the power, and the danger, of the human imagination; it is both the blessing and curse of story.
A story, in and of itself, is never dangerous. Even if its contents are seemingly malevolent, the moral content of a story if often imparted only after the fact. We used to be much more obvious about it, and we still sometimes ask what the moral of a story is. In common parlance it means something like the theme of the story, but it has a much more literal meaning when we think about how that narrative prescribes our actions.
Structure of Story--The Grand Myths
Thinking about this got me thinking about what stories we tell ourselves today. First, there is the grand, progressive narrative of history. In the Western tradition, at least, history leads ever upward toward human enlightenment and human liberation. It is a story of freedom from oppression of all types. Ultimately, it is a story of justice triumphing over caprice and maliciousness.
Buried within that story, or perhaps framed within it, is another, equally powerful story. It is the myth of capitalism (or of progress, expansion, ever-and-upward). This is a story we tell closer to home. It is a hearth story. Other people have a hearth story that embraces communism or socialism, or possibly some form of fascism. They are at once stories about how the world works, and stories of how we ought to work in the world. They are, at their heart, myths about how the world--and especially how our part of it--works.
Embedded even further in that myth, are the narratives of the people who occupy those regions. These are the stories that tell us how to confront and engage with outsiders, or with enemies, or with rival nations. They are the stories that teach us how to die dignified deaths, and how to relate ourselves to the state. Some of these stories are abandoned, as they ought to be, but others are re-appropriated and the moral changed. These stories, because they are more intimate, because they deal with the actions of real people you can relate to, are the stories that can change.
Narrative is not a panacea, nor is it an evil that once exorcised will cure the world's ills. It is a tool; and like any tool, it can be re-purposed.
New Narrative
Narrative is simply a social construct. And like all social constructs--like the economy, like race, like class--it can be changed. But only so long as the social will exists to change it. I propose that the growing emphasis on personal narrative at the expense of the national, or supranational, has damaged society. We call it tolerance, and multiculturalism, and indeed, each of these things is important. But more important than understanding our differences is understanding our similarities.
I'll say it again. I'm not so naive to believe this will solve everything. But I think it's a step in the right direction. I think that it has the potential to alter the way we see the world, and by changing our own vision, expand the way we imagine ourselves within it. To change something, first you have to imagine it another way. And that is the power of story.
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