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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

“White men can’t  drum” by Sherman Alexie  native American

National Narrative between thirty years war in 1648 and 19 C  often reaed by people I power

World Wars now from bothe sides

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Pakistan and India  failed state  Largest democracy

Kashmir

Palestine

Shia sunni

Stereoptyps

 How countries present themselves  USA tops wprld in n=burgularu assault and rape

In kidnapping New Zealand and Pakistan top the world in proportion to their populations S

 

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