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2024: Volume 8: Issue 2
■ Sijtze de Roos
Since time immemorial, people tell themselves and each other stories; orally, in writing or via radio, TV and social media. We’re sharing tales and stories about who we are or what we strive to be, about our manifold roots or what we retrospectively would prefer those to have been, about our role, function and purpose on this earth, about how we try to understand the nature of existence, or about how to cope with the ominous silence of the universe. Nothing, it seems, hurts us more than indifferent silence, than not having listeners, than not being spoken to.
Over time all these - and innumerable other - tales converge, as it were, into more or less dominant narratives that provide us with at least some sort of oversight, support, direction, comfort and meaning. The narratives we exchange vary in scope and shape. They appear as legends and myths, as scientific, philosophical or religious discourses, sometimes as sermons and admonitions and also as would-be objective descriptions. We shape our stories as fairy tales, songs, poems, articles, travelogues, blogs, TV-commercials or graphic novels. With what we tell or write each other, we aspire to shape our world to fit our needs and longings, or to resolve the deep mystery of life and to get a grip on realities that continue to elude us. It is no exaggeration to say that narratives make people: we do not tell stories, we are rather, so to speak, told by stories. Storytelling and narratives are communicative and interactive phenomena between people, created by listeners just as well as by those wo speak, shaping our common humanity for better or for worse, forging relations across great distances and between the present, the future and bygone ages.
All this, however, is not to suggest that what we relate to each other is necessarily true. The relationship between tales and reality is indirect, complicated, ambiguous and highly insecure. We are trapped in the limitations of our mental faculties. We may well-meaningly think to speak truthfully, while we are actually led by fallacious storylines, or even deceiving ourselves and each other. And then, of course, there are always tricksters who purposely bend the truth: Reynard the Fox or Brer Rabbit or Old Man Coyote. Or evasive shapeshifters like Loki who lure us away from our own words to violate the order of our narratives. All cultures, past and present, know such archetypical figures by the tales they tell and by those that are told about them.
Tales and stories may be told and retold to define what we should believe to be true. Whoever claims the power of definition claims authority over truth. As many of us do so, we see storytellers competing with each other, often even aiming to cancel each other’s story out. With our words we may express our dislike of the narratives of others, or dispute their claim to possible veracity. How truthful, for example, are the many culturally ingrained stories about lone, tough, masculine men, fearlessly walking the streets in the dark of the darkest night, or determined taxi-drivers, cruising mean streets, rooting out crime, shooting all the bad guys and purifying the world for us? Conversely, do tales of humanitarian progression and benign - more in particular female - wisdom and kindness correctly represent the human condition? Do such stories really deliver us from evil? On the other hand: could both narrative varieties not convey some form of truth? Do they compete and cancel each other out? Or could it be that both are symptomatic of ideological distortion and partisan wishful thinking? And why are tales like these so popular? What do they make of us? How does listening to them shape and reshape these stories?
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