demeterpersep250400

“People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.” Chinua Achebe

As human beings, we are predisposed to love stories. We tell stories, read stories, listen to and watch them in movies, videos, television and the internet every day.  Much of our cultural knowledge is passed down from one generation to the next in the form of narratives. Creation myths and parables instruct us in our most basic religious beliefs, while myths about powerful gods and goddesses have influenced our ideology, the set of beliefs we hold about religion, politics, and culture.

An example is the Greek myth of Persephone and Demeter, the mother and daughter who are associated with the change in seasons (Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall).  In this story, Demeter, the earth mother, retaliates against her daughter’s kidnapping (by Hades) by refusing to replenish the earth with plants or sunshine.  Eventually, there are no more crops to feed people and the existence of humankind is threatened. In response, the gods of the underworld allow Persephone to return to the earth for brief periods of time each year, and, during those times, vegetation and fruitfulness resume.

This myth explains the division of the year into winter (when the earth is bare), spring  (when vegetation begins to awaken), summer (when the crops grow), and fall (when they are harvested).  Although we may not invoke the names of these goddesses, we honor the change of each season of the year with rituals and honor the transition that comes with each one.

Mark Breitenberg of the Academy of Art Design explains that as a meaning-making species, we are born with the capacity to tell stories. “The power of stories comes from deep in our past and from deep in our consciousness: humans are homo fabulans, the species that tells stories. As the French critic Roland Barthes wrote, ‘narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society . . . it is simply there, like life itself.’” Stories show remarkable consistency from one culture to another. Russian literary scholar, Vladimir Propp claims, there are just a little over two dozen plots that appear consistently in the folklore of every culture. These plots appear time and time again in various form. Their structure remains, for the most part, unchanged by technology. Only the medium used to tell the story changes as technology evolves.

We love the stories that unfold before us each day, such as the hair stylist’s  fourteen year old granddaughter’s victory over cancer. We love stories about family feuds, lottery prize winners, movie stars’ tragic lives, the downfall of world leaders, or those that illustrate the imposition of justice on evil-doers.

More importantly, when we tell stories about our own lives, we create ourselves. Our life stories reveal themes or patterns of life decisions and responses to challenges. As we work to capture our lived experiences in stories and narratives, we discover things we may have overlooked about ourselves. As we select the details we want to share, we begin to incorporate these experiences into our perceptions of who we are as individuals. Breitenberg adds that the power of stories lies in their ability to exceed reality, re-write it, to give it a coherence that does not actually exist. And it comes from the way stories reveal the life we imagine living, the person we would like to be, the past as we wish it had been.

Given the power of narrative to shape thought, one must seriously consider Chinua Achebe’s observation that it’s not always clear who’s doing the creating–the story or the person telling the story.