How did you learn everything you know? How do you know what's right and what's wrong? What keeps you entertained day to day? I'll tell you what, the answer is stories.
When you think about it, what is the bible, the place where essential morals are derived? A collection of stories. Even if you are like me and you derive your morals from your life experience, your life is one big story. There have been so many times that I've looked back and thought well that action resulted badly let's not do that again, (blacking out and waking up in a random person's truck bed in a parking lot 2 miles from my home), or actions that end with more favorable results (studying hard and getting a good grade) that I'd like to repeat. Either way when you look back on your life you are looking back on a story where you are the protagonist and you go through some event and learn from it.
But there are also stories for another purpose, and that's entertainment. Essentially all entertainment is a story. Whether it's hanging out and partying so you create a story. Or going to see a movie or reading a book. When it boils down to it stories have 2 purposes, to teach and to entertain.
Fairytales are a certain type of story that in the course of their history have been used to simultaneously entertain and teach. One example is obviously the one our entire class has been about, Little Red Riding Hood. It started as a "let's sit around a campfire and I'll tell you a story" kind of story with the grandmother's tale. This version was purely for entertainment purposes, but I guess after a while entertainment was not enough. So leave it to a Frenchman, Charles Perrault, to think that he was so morally good to transform the story and impress his morals on the children of the bourgeoise. Then fast forward a few hundred years, and now we have authors like Angela Carter using the girl in the Red Hood to promote a feminist agenda. The point is that over the history of the story people used it however they wanted to use it. Most likely that's what is going to happen to most types of storytelling. Movies for example entertain now but who knows in a couple hundred years maybe every movie will have a message to give. It doesn't say so much about our society except that really we rely on stories to get our message across.
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Good job on your intro, it really makes the reader want to continue. I thought the way you compared life to a story was interesting, and your mentioning of the Grandmother's Tale and Perrault was amusing. After reading your blog I also have to agree with you that stories are meant to teach and entertain.
ReplyDeleteI never really thought about our past being a story. You made me think of storytelling in another level. You made a strong point on how in the next hundred years we really don't know what the purpose of storytelling will be, since our society changes so much. I really liked your blog!
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