The following is an essay from my literature class I took last semester. It was essentially the final exam essay and, thankfully, I was given interesting options for topics. My favorite part of the class was talking about why reading and stories and fiction are so important. I had to use quotes from things we'd read in class or articles that fit certain criteria and introduce them a certain way and so on. I'd also developed a certain style to fit the professor's preferences, he was an interesting one to be sure. I've edited the style slightly for your benefit but it's still kind of hilarious how different my essay writing style is from my blog writing style.
Storytelling, in its variety of forms, can be used in countless ways.Telling a story is a very personal experience that requires a storyteller and an audience. As explained by Northrop Frye in The Educated Imagination, storytelling is essential to discovering and defining personal identity.
The first way storytelling builds identity is by distinguishing the human identity from the rest of the world. Separating “me” from “not me” is the first step in identifying who you are. But Frye also says that storytelling can re-connect a single identity to the rest of the world.
“We discovered that the language of literature was associative: it uses figures of speech, like the simile and the metaphor, to suggest an identity between the human mind and the world outside it.”
Similes and metaphors compare things to each other by saying one thing is like another or one thing is another. These literary conventions can show how a human identity is comparable to something else in the world.
Hearing stories about other people or things teaches us about ourselves but can also make us feel better about ourselves, since we are not the ones making their mistakes. Paul Hernadi in his article “The Erotics of Retrospection: Historytelling, Audience Response, and the Strategies of Desire” discusses historical stories and fictional stories. In talking about how readers relate to characters, real or fictional, in a story he says, “Even when I follow fictive representations of actions, my attitude is not unlike that of the unobserved observer standing behind a two-way mirror. But such privileged status over people actually believed to have existed will enhance my self-esteem even if-or, rather, especially if-I admire them." He says that hearing about fictional characters making mistakes gives us a feeling of superiority. That feeling is increased if we are reading about real people or characters that we know and if they are people we admire as well then we feel proud that they have a fault which we do not have.
This relates back to storytelling having to do with identity, it separates your identity from the parts of the world that you don’t like. Northrop Frye, talking about a modern tendency to write about unhappy things rather than optimistic things, says, “In other words, literature not only leads us toward the regaining of identity, but it also separates this state from its opposite, the world we don’t like and want to get away from." By reading stories about unpleasant things we can distance them from ourselves. Reading the stories about other people experiencing things we don’t like can make us appreciate that we are not in their circumstances.
Storytelling can also help us understand others. In the same way that reading about someone can help us distance ourselves from things that we don’t like, it can also bring us closer to things we don’t understand. Hearing a story is a way of hearing another person’s experiences. John D. Ramage describes in an article the purpose of literature: “The task of literature, or at least of literature as a discipline, is somehow to complicate us, not simply by projecting us into foreign minds and sensibilities, but by revealing to us the means of understanding and judging those minds and sensibilities." Here he says that literature gives us a way of comparing other minds to our own. If we cannot relate the thoughts of others to our own we will have no way of understanding them. Stories give us other viewpoints and cause us to confront them and think about them until we understand how they do and don’t make sense.
The most obvious way in which storytelling accomplishes teaching us about others is in expressing the storyteller’s viewpoint. Every story has to communicate the author’s thoughts in some way because an author cannot tell a story without his or her own thoughts. In turn the author has been influenced by others and expresses their viewpoints in his or her writing. As Northrop Frye says when discussing authors, “A writer’s desire to write can only have come from a previous experience of literature, and he’ll start by imitating whatever he’s read." An author cannot write anything without imitating on some level what he or she has already read. In this way they share their experiences with their readers.
Frye continues that, through writing, the author releases experiences and emotions that would stay trapped inside otherwise. By expressing the ideas an author can make them more orderly and understand them more completely.
“For the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong."
Frye is saying that the author’s experiences belong in literature. This is introducing the idea that the storyteller’s identity comes from storytelling. A person cannot have an identity without stories to tell about themselves and other people.
Storytelling encourages learning, whether about ourselves or about others, and then it helps us apply what we have learned. Frye gives a way in which storytelling helps us organize things that we have discovered about ourselves. “Our impressions of human life are picked up one by one, and remain for most of us loose and disorganized. But we constantly find things in literature that suddenly coordinate and bring into focus a great many such impressions.” Reading stories can help us take what we have learned from various sources and organize it into patterns. Making patterns and connections leads to deeper understanding which, in turn, leads to more discovery.
Learning and understanding is important because it does lead to a deeper understanding of ourselves. Charles E. Winquist in his essay “The Act of Storytelling and the Self's Homecoming” addresses what stories have to do with our identities.
“Without a history or without a story, there is very little that we can say about ourselves. The generalization of our humanity leaves us only with superfluous bodies.”
Winquist continues: “The natural self stripped of its history is neutral” (electronic). Winquist is sayingthat without stories a person has no identity at all. Stories make our history and give us a way to tell others about ourselves.
In conclusion, storytelling is necessary to the continual creation of our identities. We cannot have an identity to begin with without a story to tell These stories tell individuals what they need to know in order to understand each other. Telling a story will assist in organizing thoughts and memories. Also, in order to continue having an identity, we must discover more about ourselves and others. An efficient way of doing this is through storytelling.
