Sarah Woods recently gave a lecture to our postgraduate students and members of the public exploring the power of stories – how they inform not only the way we communicate but how we think in our increasingly complex world. Here she invites us to think more deeply about the role of story in our own lives and as a transformational tool for society.
The French philosopher Roland Barthes says narrative ‘is present at all times, in all places, in all societies… there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups, have their stories’.
We make sense of the world through story. We use it to model and navigate the diverse and contradictory information that forms our lives. Story helps us relate and connect to the world and to each other, handle complexity, maintain our identity, rehearse new ways of being, manage change, place ourselves in time, and move through it. Story can serve as a thermometer, taking the cultural temperature of a time or group. I would argue that story isn’t just something we read or listen to, it’s a way of thinking, a language we’re fluent in. Like any language, story isn’t good or bad in itself – that depends on the individual story and on the teller.
We’re living in complex times, faced with what are often called ‘wicked problems’ like the climate crisis and global poverty and inequality, which are systemic, resist linear solutions, and require us to think and act differently.
Story should be able to help us work our way through them, yet more often it feels like story has become a blunt tool for attack and defence. Actively noticing the stories we tell and are told, and exploring our relationship with them, can help.
Understanding stories
We tend to think of story as singular, as something we watch or read, but story comes from lots of different places in our lives, so that at any point there are a number of different narratives playing out and intersecting for us. However, because they’re so much part of the fabric of our lives, we’re often less aware of them – and their power – than we might be. Having a better understanding of them can enable us to make clearer choices, to unhook ourselves from dominant social, political, cultural and personal narratives. The first step we can take towards that is to identify the topography of story in and around us, which I think can be usefully divided in to five kinds of story (see box overleaf).
As the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says:
‘I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”’
Behind his second question lie, I think, a series of questions that can help bring us towards an answer for the first, to bring us back into relationship with the stories we are swimming in.
- Who’s telling this story?
- Who do they want to listen to it?
- Why are they telling it?
- Does this story seek to divide or connect? And what or who does it want to divide or connect?
- Does it want to make enemies or friends? Of who?
- And what does this story want me to think or do, and why?
In taking this journey with story, we create space and the possibility for new stories and new kinds of story. As David Loy the American author and teacher reminds us: ‘It is not by transcending this world that we are transformed but by storying it in a new way.’
The topography of story
Stories we tell ourselves
We all carry with us an inner storyscape, stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives, about who we are and what our experiences are like. What’s possible for us is shaped by the life story we create for ourselves and the conversations we have with our inner voices, yet we’re often unaware of both.
Stories we share
We share stories with our friends, family and communities (whether they’re actual or online). From these bubbled worlds, it can be hard to see the range of viewpoints and positions that might help us better understand the motivations and experiences of others and to find ways out of polarity.
Stories we are told
Dominant narratives come from all sorts of agencies, including political parties and corporations. They surround us and are usually normalised to the point that they become invisible, part of the expected fabric of our lives.
Stories we know
We all carry with us stories from our cultural upbringings: myths, legends, religious stories and folk tales, versions of the history of our country and the world. These often guide our moral and cultural framework and are foundational for the stories we tell next.
Stories to guide us
At different times in history we have told different stories about our future. For a generation, our future visions have been dominated by dystopias and catastrophes, which can make it harder for us to imagine the better world we need to journey into.
About the author
Sarah Woods is an award-winning writer and thinker. She was part of the early Zero Carbon Britain Hub at CAT and is now a regular guest lecturer on our postgraduate module Communicating Transformational Social Change. Sarah is a research associate at Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavik.
She is currently writing a podcast series and book called The Story Crisis: how story makes and changes the world. Her dramatisation of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Origin, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on August 24th.