Tag Archives: storytelling

This week, I have mostly been thinking about play.

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This has been fun. Partly because reading and thinking about playing is itself quite a lot of fun. But also because I love diving into an entirely new topic about which I know nothing and finding out what’s going on inside it. Sometimes this is a case of acquiring a language for thoughts I’ve already had; sometimes it’s a case of looking at things in an entirely new way. This week has been a bit of both.

I’m specifically interested in ‘play’ at the moment for two pieces of work: a paper I’m delivering at a conference in a month or so, and a chapter I’m writing for someone else’s book that’s supposed to be finished scarily soon. One’s about Saint Christopher and the other’s about Beowulf, but I think both are also about play; or that both can be enriched by using the language also used to analyse play (by which I mean here ‘make-believe’, or ‘sociodramatic’ play).

In most ways, this interest in play is another facet of the questions I’m asking about storytelling, which I wrote about last week, in terms of truth and fiction, and how meaning is made and so on. While I’ve enjoyed some of it, I’ve found a lot of analysis of storytelling (usually under the heading of ‘narrative theory’) pretty dull and empty, and haven’t feel particularly stimulated or challenged by it (which is not to condemn the field, by any means; it just hasn’t fed my fires during this particular quest).

So, before I did any of this reading, I was mostly focused on the way ‘play’ tells a story, with the participants inhabiting characters. I figured that understanding how it works a bit more might help me to be clearer about how stories and the telling of stories functions. So I dove into reading some pretty foreign fields – primarily educational theory – to see what they had to say for themselves. And it was just a boundless joy. It’s excited me to the point where I’m having to hold myself back just a little bit from coming up with entirely new papers and ideas and rein it in, at least until I’ve completed the things I’ve got started.

What’s exciting me now is thinking about, first, how some things really matter and have to be a certain way, while most things absolutely don’t and can become anything at all. The balance between rules and chaos intrigues me, and particularly the way it’s negotiated on or understood by all of the participants. This points towards the obviously fascinating aspect of play: how transformative it is of objects, environments, and participants – while also being a recognisably closed world, with participants able to step outside of ‘play mode’ at any moment. That stepping in and out of ‘play’ seems just magical to me (which probably says more about how irretrievably trapped in my own self-awareness I am than anything else). I’m also interested in the way play often consciously takes on known stories and then varies them, adding elements or looking before and after. My final major plank of interest is in how (when it works) play creates stories cooperatively, in effect constructing a community by agreeing what matters and taking account of other people’s concerns. This relates back to the stepping in and out, where participants agree to notice certain things that are said and done, and not others.

It’s going to take a bit of effort to move this forwards, I think. I’m looking forward to seeing my nephews next week and might try to talk to them about play and how it works, just to stretch my thinking a bit further and possibly to try to relate play and storytelling a bit more tightly. I definitely need to spend some time to allow the new things I’ve read to percolate before I return to apply them to my thinking about the telling of stories in hagiography and in Beowulf. So that all feels like a challenge, and like one I haven’t really got the time to face. But I like academic work when it’s like this: I feel as thought I’m looking out at something new, and that I don’t know what’s going to happen next; like I’m playing, I suppose. From being pretty confident that I had two pieces of work all done bar the writing up, I now don’t know what either of them will say.

This week, I have mostly been thinking about storytelling.

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I find this a surprisingly challenging thing to do, in part because it’s such a terribly broad topic. Storytelling is all around us; for a number of different research strands, it seems increasingly to be seen as what defines us as humans, the origin of language itself as well as socialization. Less fundamentally, it’s also currently very in vogue as an idea in medicine and management among – I presume – a large number of other fields. My major interest is in how stories changed and how they were used in different times and places; a good chunk of my work at the moment consists of looking at different retelling of saint Christopher’s story and being interested in what’s changed, why, and what impact that has.

I’ve had a lot of fun, over the last few weeks or so, reading some serious philosophy by people like Mary Midgley, academic analysis by a whole range of writers, and being particularly excited by discussions of their art as storytellers by Phillip Pullman, Neil Gaiman and – above all – the late and brilliant Ursula Le Guin. It’s been challenging and thrilling, and (as will probably be obvious below), a major challenge for me is working out how to pin down in precise terms what it is that I’m trying to say. Which is always worth thinking through, and often suggests that what you’re thinking about is worth thinking about – because what’s the point of working on something if you already know how to say it? (Like most things in life, this is a problem T.S. Eliot puts much better.)

At its simplest, though, thinking about storytelling means focusing not on what’s happened, but on how what’s happened is recounted or recorded. That means thinking about which events are selected for ‘telling’ – and which aren’t. It also means noticing what order events are told in – that’s often described as ‘plot’, as opposed to ‘storyline’. And which events, characters, or other details are focused on – and which are not. It also means paying attention to who is telling the story – a fictional or supposedly ‘real’ narrator or author figure, and how the presence of that figure affects the story’s meaning or feeling.

What I’ve been trying to do this week, though, is think in a slightly more abstracted way about how stories work; what it is that makes them have such significance. Encountering a story shows us, I think, that there is somewhere else; that where we are is not everywhere. It also shows us that the way we look at the world is not the only way to look at it. This is especially true when, as is so frequently the case in medieval texts, a story keeps telling us who is telling it – when we can’t avoid being aware that we are being forced to see the world through someone else’s eyes. By having that other-where and other-view revealed to us, we are forced to recognise the individuality of our own experience of the world, and indeed the uniqueness and specificity of our particular corner of existence.

Mostly as a result of this, I think that stories live in a different world from that of history. Once we have accepted the principle of an other-where, an other-when, and an other-view, the idea that there is a limited number of any of these others becomes absurd. Infinity becomes inevitable. Time becomes a matter of perspective. Stories do not exist in time; they are pulled into specific moments in time by storytellers and, as a result, when someone, something, or somewhere is connected to a story by hearing one or being incorporated into one, they in turn become tied into that trans-historical time. When a fighter becomes a hero, or a leader becomes a King, they don’t become immortal; it’s bigger than that. They step outside of normal time altogether, becoming part of an altogether different form of existence. They become abstracted from the merely human, and assume a different life entirely – which is part of the reason why stories become so flexible (there’s a link here to Platonic thought and essentialism that probably doesn’t need spelling out). A storyteller has the power to reach into that timeless plane of stories, and tie one little part of it to one little part of the here and now.

That’s what I’ve been trying to think through. As is obvious, I think, I’m still trying to think about it more carefully and clearly. Even though we live a storied existence in a world made out of stories (and not just because of the lowering presence of Fake News), I’m not at all sure that these lines of enquiry have any relevance at all to the wider world. But it’s certainly a fun, stimulating game to play, and it’s opened up lots of space in my head into which future research should flow.