Story

Introduction

Introduction "Where is Ikaang [God]?" "We don't know, but the elands do." !king, a San storyteller Stories provide us with truth; they take the flotsam and jetsam of our lives, and give those shards a sense of narrative, of form, and therefore of verity. But that truth is slippery, and a crucial characteristic of stories is that they can be revised, are in fact constantly in the process of being modified. So if story is truth, then truth is never absolute, is never wholly one thing, not another. And so it is that historians routinely take the events of the past and give them a new gloss, recasting the stories again and again. So it is that heroic stories are revised, retold, and yesterday's heroism becomes a distinctly unheroic kind of villainy today. History is a story that is never wholly told, never entirely true, but always at least partially true, always true at least in its parts: the events keep sliding around, as each storyteller, each historian, rearranges the incidents, reinterprets, retells, and meaning alters-often slightly, sometimes more dramatically, with audiences providing a necessary set of contemporary emotional reactions. The events of the past are never sealed. Story provides insight but never closure. These traditions are in the care of the storytellers.1 The substance of history depends on "my feelings," argues the historian.2 What does the fact that meaning is largely emotional suggest about traditional ways of analyzing story? Storytelling, especially that occurring in oral societies, has often been misinterpreted, many seeking to reduce the stories to rudimentary Aesop's fable morality, to obvious homily, while missing the true messages of the stories. Those who have studied narrative, moreover, have too frequently sought mathematical certitude in organization, while missing the real power of the stories. We begin this examination of story with four scenes: 3 Copyrighted Material 4 Introduction SCENE ONE: IMAGE AND EMOTION First, a scene in Zululand, along the southeastern coast of Africa. The story is over, the performer moving now into the audience, as the men and women in the gathering disperse, discussing her performance. Each member of the audience seems to be walking away with his or her own very personal interpretation of the story. It is clear that there is a core area of agreement: the surface moral of the story, no one disagrees with that-"That is obvious," they say, suggesting that it is so apparent that it is hardly worthy of further analysis. And there is clear consensus regarding the formal elements of the story-"Is that not plain?" they wonder, as the patterning of the story is appraised. The diversity of interpretation has to do with biography and history, with the way the contemporary images interact with the ancient fantasy imagery. But much of the interpretation is framed in experiences only hinted at by the storyteller. It becomes evident that members of the audience, as their individual emotions are elicited and then woven into the form of the performance, bring their own predilections, hopes, fears, experiences into the story as well. The story becomes a focal point for harmonizing the idiosyncratic experiences and histories of the members of the audience; it occurs within the context of the audience's emotions. SCENE TWO: NARRATIVE What meaning is conveyed by story? The question can be answered on several levels. On the most obvious level is the didactic message that flows easily across the surface of the tale. That is the one that audiences may take away with them intellectually, but it is not the one that touches them emotionally. The fact that meaning or message is essentially constructed of feeling makes the story somewhat difficult to discuss at times, emotions being complex and generally untidy entities. This second scene is situated among the Ndebele people in the southern part of Zimbabwe. Eva Ndlovu, a forty-five-year-old Ndebele woman, is about to perform before an audience a story about tradition and an old woman: It is reported. There was long ago an old woman who regularly traveled with children when they went to dig ochre. This particular ochre, in the place where they dug it, was beautiful in an exceedingly wonderful way. Copyrighted Material Introduction 5 Eva Ndlovu, a Ndebele storyteller in Zimbabwe, works the complex of images that she has evoked into a linear narrative strand. At the same time, she works the images...