On Stories by Richard Kearny
Where do Stories Come From?
One
If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating.
3
Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living. They are what make our condition human.
This was recognised from the very beginnings of Western civilisation. Hesiod tells us how the founding myths (mythos in
Greek means ‘story’) were invented to explain how the world came to be and how we came to be in it. Myths were stories people told themselves in order to explain themselves to themselves and to others. But it was Aristotle who first developed this insight into a philosophical position when he argued, in his Poetics, that the art of storytelling – defined as the dramatic imitating and plotting of human action – is what gives us a shareable world.
It is, in short, only when haphazard happenings are transformed into story, and thus made memorable over time, that we become full agents of our history. This becoming historical involves a transition from the flux of events into a meaningful social or political community – what Aristotle and the Greeks called a polis. Without this transition from nature to narrative, from time suffered to time enacted and enunciated, it is debatable whether a merely biological life (zoe) could ever be considered a truly human one (bios). As the twentieth-century thinker Hannah Arendt argued: ‘The chief characteristic of
On Stories
A Winter’s Tale
Part One Where do Stories Come From?
4
the specifically human life . . . is that it is always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story. . . . It is of this life, bios, as distinguished from mere zoe, that Aristotle said that it
“somehow is a kind of action (praxis)”.’1
What works at the level of communal history works also at the level of individual history. When someone asks you who you are, you tell your story. That is, you recount your present
One
If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating.
3
Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living. They are what make our condition human.
This was recognised from the very beginnings of Western civilisation. Hesiod tells us how the founding myths (mythos in
Greek means ‘story’) were invented to explain how the world came to be and how we came to be in it. Myths were stories people told themselves in order to explain themselves to themselves and to others. But it was Aristotle who first developed this insight into a philosophical position when he argued, in his Poetics, that the art of storytelling – defined as the dramatic imitating and plotting of human action – is what gives us a shareable world.
It is, in short, only when haphazard happenings are transformed into story, and thus made memorable over time, that we become full agents of our history. This becoming historical involves a transition from the flux of events into a meaningful social or political community – what Aristotle and the Greeks called a polis. Without this transition from nature to narrative, from time suffered to time enacted and enunciated, it is debatable whether a merely biological life (zoe) could ever be considered a truly human one (bios). As the twentieth-century thinker Hannah Arendt argued: ‘The chief characteristic of
On Stories
A Winter’s Tale
Part One Where do Stories Come From?
4
the specifically human life . . . is that it is always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story. . . . It is of this life, bios, as distinguished from mere zoe, that Aristotle said that it
“somehow is a kind of action (praxis)”.’1
What works at the level of communal history works also at the level of individual history. When someone asks you who you are, you tell your story. That is, you recount your present