how stories make sense of the world
This famous story from Plato's republic illustrates the value of the symbol in creating understanding. Symbols, images and methaphors are among the earliest devices of storytelling, apparently as old as storytelling itself. That is not to say primitive, nor simple. Symbols can be richly texstured, deeply layered and puzzling to decipher. Fables that are told in this manner are very powerful and elegant teaching tools. Symbols have the ability to affect our emotions to a far greater degree than everyday life, what Anthony D. Smith describes as "...a land of dreams ... far more significant than any actual terrain."
For pure entertainment we like to abandon reality for a short while and enter a fictional storyland. But we do so usually in the hope that we will find something in storyland that will be of use to us in our real life. The Triumph of Narrative was the title of Robert Fulford's 1999 Massey Lectures, broadcast on CBC Radio's Ideas. Fulford says "Stories survive partly because they remind us of what we know, and partly because they call us back to what we consider significant." So we invent stories that can make use of what we already know. And we create lessons that can have a significance in our everyday lives.
Stories are reassuring. Rather than worry ourselves about, for instance, what the salmon are doing out there in the ocean, it is easier to just accept the myth that they are doing quite nicely and they will return soon. Denys Arcand's controversial film Jesus of Montreal is the story of an actor in a Montreal production of the Passion Play. Eventuallly the actor's real life begins to parallel that of Jesus. The story restates and reaffirms the story of Christ, his sacrifice and resurrection. Such a story provides a reassuring explanation for the otherwise inexplicable.
Sometimes making sense of the word is nothing more than familiarity. If the story is acceptable, it is told and retold and gathers an increasing audience. After enough retellings, we grow familiar with the story. We hear it from many different sources, and come to accept as truth even the most impossible stories. The story stops even being called a story and it acquires the status of a myth. Frye says, "Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have 'really happened,'" Once we accept the story as real, it then becomes a cornerstone on which the rest of the culture can be built.
There is another dimension to how the story makes sense of the world. And that is the power of the story to influence real events, or to alter the course of history. Salmon Rushdie said "Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts." We see this all the time in science fiction. To quote George Orwell "Myths which are believed in tend to become true." He ought to know. In his book Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell invented a language of abbreviations which he called "newspeak". Orwell's characters unquestioningly used this disconcerting language almost fifty years before we made it a reality. Now we are so comfortable with terms like LASER, MODEM, PICT, CD-ROM, we forget that they are acronyms. When I recently asked for advice on DVD-RAM decks, our technicians recommended the "...DSR-1500 because it accepts DVCAM and DVC-PRO formats as well as miniDV. And it uses a serial port rather than FireWire." Much better.
Orwell also invented the term Big Brother. Storytellers apparently create the future.
