The Truth Lies in the Telling
There is always someone in the family or one’s circle of
friends who becomes the designated story teller. They possess the art of taking
ordinary facts and enthralling their audience with suspense, humour or high
drama.
Story telling is the oldest form of transmission of
knowledge. Visual story telling from cave
paintings, Egyptian and Assyrian reliefs, to contemporary narrative painting,
photography and cinema. Oral histories and religious beliefs, moral fables and
fairy tales and poetry were gradually preserved in written form. However, even
in the written form, the voice of the narrator is always present. For every
story there is a story teller, whether a scientific paper, an account of
historical events or fiction writing, And where there is a story teller, there is inevitably a point of view determined by the context of time, social values, and intention.
Narration aims to influence the readers or listeners, to make them share the
narrator’s perspective. In its most innocent form, a poet or song
writer wants the listener to understand their emotional experience. At its more
manipulative extreme may be the writing of national histories, which while
factual, leave out events that do not conform to the desired self-image of a
nation. A more overt form is that of propaganda. Propaganda has always been
used by kings and conquerors, minting coins with their image, or commissioning
paintings or statues showing them as all powerful. Negative propaganda emerged
during WWI, and continues till present times, when the enemy was to be
ridiculed or vilified to sway public opinion.
The idea of a point of view is in itself not a sinister
intention but is a natural way of viewing anything. Art and photography teach the need for a
point of view and the need to establish the boundaries of that view in the form
of a composition. An artist of photographer makes an aesthetic choice about
what to include and what to exclude in a composition. The problem would arise only if the artist instead
it was the only point of view that could be taken. As art theorist Elliott Eisner says, the arts
not only teach that there can be more than one solution to a problem, but also
that there many ways to see and interpret the world.
William Faulkner in his 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury,
presents the downfall of the aristocratic Compson family from four different
perspectives. Lawrence Durrell does the same in the Alexandria Quartet written
between 1957 and 1960. One of the most famous and influential of multiple story
telling is the Thousand and One Nights or Alif Layla wa Layla, its original
Arabic title, which created a unique literary genre. It tells the story
of Scheherazade, who recounts stories all night to the ill tempered monarch
Shahyar who vowed to marry a new virgin every day and have the last one
executed. Scheherazade, a well read, wise and accomplished woman, who has since
become a feminist symbol , volunteers to marry Shahryar. Her mesmerizing skill
at story telling keeps her alive night after night until Shahryar falls in love
with her and is transformed into a benevolent monarch.
The stories It is
first mentioned in the 9th C
When we tell stories about ourselves, they also serve
another important (arguably higher) function: They help us to believe our lives
are meaningful. author Jonathan Gotschall "The storytelling mind"—the
human mind, in other words—"is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and
coincidence,"
The Sound and the Fury, novel by William Faulkner, published
in 1929, that details the destruction and downfall of the aristocratic Compson
family from four different points of view.
The very nature of narrative demands that the narratve voice
be take into consideration. For every story there ust eb a story teller. Thetask
of the narrative voice is to influence the readers to think in certain ways or
ascribe certain meanings to the story
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