National Storytelling week

It is national storytelling week. See: https://www.awarenessdays.com/awareness-days-calendar/national-storytelling-week-2019/. The Society for Storytelling is promoting its mission regarding the promotion of the oral tradition of storytelling, which was the original (?) way in which linguistically competent humans would communicate sophisticated information to each other. In the modern world that oral tradition has been lost. We rarely practice our storytelling abilities with each other, preferring instead to use the written word, books, articles, blogs (ahem!) and so on, or structured oral expression such as lectures. Our oral storytelling abilities are now largely limited to talking to each other in cafes and pubs about things that have happened to us recently – which usually isn’t real storytelling but sharing fragments of our lives with friends and colleagues.

The oral tradition involved storytellers, professional or amateur, collecting stories of events, news items, myths, and so on, who would visit a town or village and relate those sophisticated stories to their audience. They then moved on to another town or village and do the same thing. The skills required of the storyteller were considerable. Not only did they have to be interesting speakers who could project their voices across perhaps large audiences, they had astounding memories that they could recall at will, in order, and in detail. How did the people of England find out about Henry V’s victory at Agincourt? Or the invasion of William the Bastard? Most people could not read. There were no newspapers, TV, radio or internet, so the country relied on storytellers (of course, many stories would grow through the telling and retelling).

We rarely practice our memories for the oral tradition. As a lecturer I am as guilty as so many others in preparing detailed PowerPoint presentations, the information on the slides acting as aides de memoire for the detail of what I want to say. This was different even when I was an undergraduate in the 1980s. Most lecturers then would write a few key words on the board and build a lecture around these key words, ie they had to have memories for the structure and plot of the lecture.

In recent years memory has become significantly less important, with Google information on tap – literally, tapping a smartphone keyboard and getting instant information. It will be interesting to observe how and if people retain their mnemonic skills in the future.

Storytelling, or narrative, is about many things. One important factor is coherence. A story must have a chronology, a plot, characters, structure, and so on. These fit together using a series of rules and when these rules are applied accurately they produce a good coherent story. We are all storytellers and story listeners. It is one of the fundamental things that makes us human. In our research into traumatic stress we make use of the stories people tell in order to make sense of what has happened to them. Typically, if someone experiences a traumatic event, this impacts significantly on their life story, it disrupts the story, makes it less coherent, ‘ruins the plot’, and ceases to make sense. A life story must make sense so the purpose of enabling recovery from trauma is to restructure the life story, to regain the plot and make it coherent. It doesn’t matter whether this is carried out via a therapist, writing about one’s experiences, talking to friends, or just thinking about it, the life story needs to make sense, to have meaning.

This is why national storytelling week is important. It is a reminder that we all function by telling stories and listening to them. They may not be as sophisticated as those told in the distant oral tradition, but they are still what makes us human. Perhaps we should spend less time with Google and its fragmented facts and more time constructing stories.