Story

Conclusion

Conclusion My story being done, She gave me for my pains a world of sighs .... Shakespeare, Othello The pictures painted on rocks ten thousand years ago are silent testimony to the essence of story: the layered image, the essential trope. Images are the materials of story, narrative plotting and pattern are the devices that organizes these images into layers, and tropes are the result . But something even more dynamic is occurring: story is indeed narrative, it is pattern, it is trope, but most important it is the manipulation of the emotions of members of the audience into form. That is the end, the final message ofstorytelling. All else, including homilies, biographies , histories, is secondary, floating on the surfaces of stories, seeking to take advantage of the enormous, potent undercurrent of feeling, a diversity of emotions that moves from the ancient images to the contemporary experiences of the storyteller and those in her audience. At the center of San myth is a layering of imagery; metaphor and all of its allies are evident in the ambiguity of the god character, a being who is simultaneously animal, human, and god. He is a god acting out in heavenly terms what will subsequently be echoed by humans in an overlay of the original god activities. God first acts it out; this is the master plan. Then humans act it out, or attempt to, in their sometimes unsuccessful, always puny, effort to duplicate what God has created in the master plan. The creation myth is this: God goes through a series of adventures that involve the ambiguous relationship between gods and humans and animals, then humans attempt to have the same experience , in the process reducing the heavenly master plan to earthly dimensions . Humans thereby participate in the creation. It is because humans do participate in the creation process that they get it wrong, and that is how death comes into the world, because humans are not able to wholly fulfill the master plan. Oral tradition regularly makes use of the two categories of imagery. In San oral tradition, contemporary figures coexist with fantasy characters , humans and gods, animals and humans, gods and animals. Performance of oral tales graphically reveals an artistic interaction. The spoken word is clearly dominant in such events, but of comparable importance is the music of the word, the movement of the body, and the spatial organization of the body and the word before an audience 269 Copyrighted Material 270 Conclusion which, though seemingly uninvolved in the actual presentation, nevertheless is central to its artistic success. The storyteller uses his body, the music of the language, and the audience in such a way that they provide an artistic-not a realistic-framework for the communication of the word. The story is being told within that unnatural environment, and it is in that context that reality and fantasy have their meeting place. Within the tightly controlled context of music, dance, and audience relations, realistic and fantasy images interact, and in the interaction the past exerts its will on the present, is assessed in terms of the present: the message of storytelling is the tension generated by seemingly antithetical temporal arrangements. San civilization's venerable art tradition-its rock paintings and engravings , hundreds of years old-reach deep into human history. We have seen that, in rock art, contemporary images of hunters might be superimposed over ancient images of gods and fantasy creatures. A key to understanding the dynamic quality of this ancient storytelling tradition is in the relationship between the layered images. In contemporary times, San rock painting and engraving have been discontinued , but there have been notable artistic achievements in dance, along with a highly evolved oral storytelling tradition. Dances have been documented from the nineteenth century, and myths have been collected in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. "They told myths; and above all, they danced."J In the dance, the dual imagery, the superimposed images, are especially graphic, as living people of the contemporary world don the masks, and so the present and the past are dynamically, potently, richly joined. During a dance accompanying a girl's initiation rite, for example, a man with a bird's beak on his head played a crucial role.2 And, in San myth, Mantis, an ambiguous merging of human, animal, and god, is a divine trickster, a culture hero, creator of San civilization. That trickster, !kaggen, the mantis, said Ihan=kass'o, a San storyteller, "cheats them that we may not...