The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser
If a tree has a story, can the tree tell it? Who would it tell it to? And how would it tell it? How do you tell stories? And how does anyone know that you are telling one? Does it make any sense at all to you to ask, "Does a tree have a story?"
I think it must make some sense, but what kind of sense? When you can isolate the "sense" of what a tree's story might be, I think you are beginning to understand how important pattern is to telling and understanding a story. Without a pattern, no story can make sense. The more a person's (or a tree's) story fits into a pattern that is accepted by people (or trees or anyone or anything else), then that story is more likely to be understood. So, to go back to the question: If a tree has a story, can the tree tell it?
Part of the answer is that a story is understood because of an agreement to agree with agreed upon, shared, meaning. To understand a story, you must first agree to play by the rules. The tree shares meaning with other trees and the animals and insects and people who respond to it. If, for instance, insects attack the tree by boring into it, the tree has a limited defense against the attack. It can secrete a protective enzyme. The response to the attack is part of the tree's story. Throughout millions of years, a story has evolved between trees and insects. Very simply, part of this story goes like this: insects attack me and I respond. This is the tree's story; the insects would have a very different one! But the insects also are closely linked to the tree because of the story they both share.
People share a similar story with the tree. If people are attacked by a virus, some people's body produce the necessary protective enzymes. Others do not. The disease AIDS is a breakdown in the body's protective story. A person with AIDS is vulnerable to illnesses that people who do not have AIDS can easily protect themselves from. A simple flu virus could be fatal to someone with AIDS. AIDS is a virus that destroys the body's protective story.
The first rule of NARRATIVE: There are NO simple stories. (And the second rule is: All stories have a simple structure.)
Why do stories appeal to us? Why do we listen when someone says to us, "Hey! I want to tell you a story"? How would we recognize a story unless we already knew something very essential about it? And if we don't know what the content is, then we must know something very important about what the form is.
The travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin describes an experiment he made with story. He looked at an heroic tale that is one of the basic stories of English literature. But it is also a story that is very similar to many such "basic stories." Many cultures have stories like Beowulf. But so do many newspaper articles! Chatwin is comparing a story told over thousand years ago to a story told and re-told (and re-lived) just a few short years ago. How is such a thing possible? I believe it is possible because when you examine stories carefully, looking at their pattern, their form, you will discover that there are very few original stories.
I once made the experiment of slotting the career of a modern hero, Che Guevara, on to the structure of the Beowulf epic. The result was, with a bit of tinkering here and there, that both heroes are seen to perform the same set of exploits in the same sequence: the leave-taking; the voyage across the sea; the defeat of the Monster (Grendel-Batista); the defeat of the Monster's mother (`The water-hag' — the Bay of Pigs). Both heroes receive their reward: a wife, fame, treasure (in Guevara's case a Cuban wife and the Directorship of the National Bank of Cuba), and so forth. Both end up dying in a distant country: Beowulf killed by the Scaly Worm, Guevara by the Dictator of Bolivia. As a man, Guevara, for all his charm, strikes one as a ruthless and unpleasant personality. As a Hero, he never put a foot wrong — and the world chooses to see him as a Hero.— Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines. NY: Penguin, 1987.
Not only are there no simple stories, there are no absolutely true (or false) ones either. Looking at stories we can see that language cannot be tied down to specific scientific or dogmatic meaning in all of its important details. Otherwise there would only be one story. And life would be very very very boring. A psychologist expresses this idea in the following manner:
As Owen Barfield and Norman Brown have written: "Literalism is the enemy." I would add: "Literalism is sickness." Whenever we are caught in a literal view, a literal belief, a literal statement, we have lost the imaginative metaphorical perspective to ourselves and our world. Story is prophylactic in that it presents itself always as "once upon a time," as an "as if," "make-believe" reality. It is the only mode of accounting or telling about that does not posit itself as real, true, factual, revealed, i.e. literal.— James Hillman, "A Note on Story," Parabola, IV:4, 1979.
Stories always partake of a pattern. The pattern, our ability to recognize it, is what gives a story its recognition and acceptance. The pattern, our ability to vary it, is what gives a story its uniqueness and acceptance as something new and individual.
Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.—Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (Penquin, NY: 1990)
Stories start with memory. And since memory is common to all stories, it is memory that provides the basic structure for the story. And it is this structure that makes stories recognizable to the audience. The audience expects the story to unfold in a certain way, and good story-tellers take advantage of these expectations.
In its most simple form, the story, like all forms of communication, has a Beginning, Middle, and an End. More specifically, a written story (and a written essay of any kind) has a beginning that is an Introduction, a middle that is a Body, and an end that is a Conclusion. These parts of the written story have specific, though universal, functions.
| The Introduction is designed to get the
readers' Interest and to provide Information about what the rest of the story
is about.
The Body is to provide all the necessary Details to keep the readers interested. The Conclusion Unifies the reading experience and, ideally, leaves the reader with an Image that will help the reader to recall to memory the story at some later date. |
Here is how memory shapes the structure of narrative:
The Introduction begins in the present time. For example, you might be watching television and see a scene that reminds you of something that happened to you years ago. [Be sure to study the 10 types of introductions.]The Body of the story is about what happened years ago; it is in the past time.
The Conclusion of the story returns you to the present time.
Memory is the Main Story (the Body), but the present condition of the story-teller is the setting for the story to come into existence. There must be enough details in the Body of the story to keep the readers interested, but there must also be enough details in both the Introduction and the Conclusion to convince the readers that this story really does have a Present, that it is genuine. If you were to tell the story, you could just begin with "Once upon a time." But this is not a telling story: this is a written story. If you were telling the story, you and the audience are already in the present time. In writing, you must establish this present time. Writing demands that you create CONTEXT.
Context is what writing is all about. Because the writer must create context, the writer relies on predictable structure. When speaking, the structure for communication is supplied to both the speaker and the listener. In writing, all the context must be supplied for the reader by the writer. This need to establish context, not grammar, spelling, and punctuation, is the main reason why writing is difficult.
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