The art of storytelling and why it’s not going to die anytime soon
Once upon a time, there was a moment in human history when one of our ancient ancestors looked down at her or his hand and thought, “What the fuck am I? Where did I come from? What am I doing here? And, wow, check out this opposable thumb!”
There’s a good reason we respond to stories. Human beings have been storytellers for as long as we have been capable of abstract thought.
Stories have always been more than just entertainment.
At its most heightened, storytelling is a way of grappling with the vast and abstract nature of existence.
Stories are how we capture, condense, and communicate the essence of what it means to be human.
At its most basic, storytelling is about survival. Tales of gods and heroes make sense of natural forces outside our control. Myths and legends are mnemonic devices that allowed us to survive and thrive as a species.
It kind of looks like the same thing, but completely lacks flavour or distinguishing features.
It’s all in the story
The stories that grab us are the ones that seduce us and burrow down into our souls. They do that because they’re born of human experience.
Art isn’t a product. It’s not something glued together from bits pulled out of a box. There’s no flat-pack art of any value. It’s the result of a process guided by human emotions and informed by the myriad things that make us who we are.
An artist sets out to make a work of art—whether that’s a song, a painting, a poem, or a play—by bringing a lifetime’s experience to the table. It’s not writing a prompt and having a machine spit out a plagiarised puree of words that resembles what it thinks a human might feel.
For example, I asked ChatGPT to write a sentence that would make me cry.
This is what I got:
When she packed away his favourite mug, she realised the only thing in the house that still remembered him was the dust on its rim.
Yeah.
Sort of a few things there. But it’s a random handful of Lego. It’s not a fully realised Millennium Falcon (yes, Star Wars nerd. Sue me.)
So, I had a go at the same idea myself:
She never got around to fixing the chip in his favourite mug, which broke when it fell from his hand that last breakfast together; but she kept it next to hers in the cupboard just the same and sometimes brewed him tea anyway—’strong and sweet, like you’ he used to say—and let it get cold on the sink.
If that moves you even a little bit, it’s because my own experience of loss is speaking to you through those words. I’m channelling the grief I feel when I think of people dear to my heart who are no longer with me and imagine a future when I lose those who remain.
If you understand, it’s because you have felt it too.
We’re speaking to each other through the medium of those words.
There are few things more human than that.
The most potent art is never formulaic
The “Persian flaw” was a deliberate error woven into a Persian rug by the weaver. It was there to acknowledge that the only creator capable of perfection was Allah.
Don’t know about that. They clearly haven’t tasted my Christmas pudding.
But the most potent art is never formulaic. It doesn’t follow a set of SEO prompts. It’s not created to maximise clicks, follows, or views. Just like my Christmas pudding kind of follows a recipe but changes slightly every year. I couldn’t ever repeat it.
That’s what the best art is like. You can’t necessarily pick what it is, exactly, that speaks to you. But you know it when you see it.
Or, should I say: you know it when you feel it.
Often, it’s the random and accidental moments that feed into its creation that make a work of art sing.
The story is as important as the art
Whatever its form—whether it’s art on a page, or a canvas, or a playlist—the art that moves us has a backstory.
Vincent Van Gogh didn’t just make pretty pictures. That’s not why we’re obsessed with him. We’re touched by his art because we connect with his story.
Starry Night isn’t just a painting of a night sky. It’s the view out the window of the asylum Van Gogh retreated to after his mental breakdown and the infamous ear episode. We value the story almost as much as the art object itself.
Want proof? Take the painting once owned by the National Gallery of Victoria and described as a self-portrait by Van Gogh. Its value then? Fifteen million dollars or so.
Enter the Van Gogh Museum. When questions were raised about the painting’s authorship, the world authority on the artist examined it and declared it a dud. In an instant, its value dropped to a few thousand at best.
The painting had not changed in any material sense. What had changed, however, was its story.
That’s where the value lies. Its story.
Making Vincent Van Gogh
You know who knew that better than anyone? Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, the widow of Vincent’s art-dealer brother, Theo, who inherited Van Gogh’s entire body of work.
Vincent famously didn’t sell a single painting during his lifetime. His posthumous fame came when Johanna saw the value of the stories captured in Vincent’s letters to his brother. She tapped into the stories behind the paintings and marketed his work to collectors across Europe.
Without Johanna, we would never have met Vincent.
Thank fuck, right?
Storytelling as a survival guide
For tens of thousands of years, storytelling was, quite literally, a matter of life and death.
As human beings moved further from their place of origin in the animal kingdom, their brains became something else.
All other species know how to navigate vast swathes of sea or land without maps and signs, much less GPS. Most of us humans? Not so much.
Like, I’m sorry, but how the fuck do salmon spend seven years out at sea, and still find their way back to the river they were born in to spawn? My kids wouldn’t even be able to point you in the direction of the hospital they were born in.
We lost those skills while our brains were becoming organs that allowed us to worry about things like how to get a mortgage to buy a house so we no longer have to migrate when the weather turns foul. But for our ancient ancestors, and for indigenous communities who still rely on ancient wisdom, mnemonic devices embedded in stories are a matter of survival.
Memory palace
If you’ve ever tried to memorise the times tables or the conjugation of the verb ‘to be’ in Latin, you’ll know how difficult rote learning can be.
It’s why storytelling was such an important thing for our ancient ancestors. When we were still wandering the landscape, following the migration of the wild herds that we needed for our prehistoric barbecues, we didn’t have beasts of burden to lug our shit around with us. We had to carry it ourselves.
Think of yourself packing for a month in Europe. If you’re carting your bag yourself, you get damned efficient at downsizing. For bookish folk like me, the Kindle and bag-space saved on books was a godsend.
It was the same for our prehistoric ancestors. Stories weren’t read from a page, because who could be buggered dragging clay tablets from campsite to campsite? Stories were recited out loud and handed down from generation to generation.
The world’s oldest story
We know this, because so many stories have passed down virtually unchanged for thousands of years.
And astronomers have identified one that may well be the oldest on earth. That’s right, astronomers. Not historians, palaeontologists or archaeologists.
Bear with me. This is a ripper.
A cluster of stars called the Pleiades are also known as the Seven Sisters. Funny thing, though—if you track them down on a clear night, you’ll only see six, not seven stars.
This is where it gets interesting. Stories of seven heavenly sisters appear in otherwise unrelated European, African, Asian, American Indian, and Aboriginal Australian traditions. All the stories begin with a tale of seven women being pursued into the stars by men.
For the Ancient Greeks, the Pleiades were the seven daughters of Atlas—the guy who held the sky on his shoulders for eternity. Zeus transformed Atlas’ daughters into stars to protect them from being raped by Orion (yeah, rape is a depressingly consistent theme in human storytelling). But the seventh daughter, who had fallen in love with a human, took off with her boyfriend instead. That’s why, according to Greek mythology, we only see six stars.
Half a world away, Indigenous Australian traditions tell a very similar story. Seven sisters were stars, pursued by hunters. Only, one of them disappeared when she hid or was abducted.
Same story, different ending
A collection of stars in the sky can be anything, right? A saucepan. A bull. A man with a bow and arrow. The mnemonic devices used by human beings to read the stars have always been creative, or we’d forget them.
So why would so many diverse cultures choose the exact same story to describe the constellation?
Here’s the kicker. Stars move over time. The reason it only looks like there are six stars in the Pleiades is that one has moved close enough to another that it now looks like a single star.
But astronomers did some calculations and discovered that 100,000 years ago, the stars were in different positions, and all seven would have been visible to the naked eye.
Out of Africa
Know what else happened 100,000 years ago?
The great human migration out of Africa began. Our ancestors travelled across the globe, eventually populating all continents other than Antarctica. Indigenous Australians arrived downunder at least 60,000 years ago and established the longest continuing culture on the planet.
The theory is that all these people who once lived together in Africa carried with them the foundation story of the seven sisters. But once they settled in new homes and thousands of years passed, the seventh sister ‘disappeared’ from the sky. That required a coda to the story.
So, each of the indigenous cultures that speak of the Seven Sisters has a different explanation for what happened to the missing sister.
Sure, it’s just a theory. But it’s a fucking good one if you ask me.
Once upon a time
The power of storytelling transports us to imagined worlds and transcends the preoccupations—and dangers—of daily life.
It inspires us and lifts us up. Storytelling offers us companionship and wisdom and offers us a sanctuary where we might find comfort and peace.
It’s this deeply ingrained and very human instinct that compels mothers and fathers to read aloud to their children at bedtime, as our ancient ancestors once huddled, wide-eyed, around the safety of a campfire and listened while a wise woman or man recalled tales of gods, ancestors, and great deeds.
Storytelling is the tangible record of humanity.
It lives on in every one of us.
This triggered a memory of Joseh Campbell reflecting on core stories being held by different cultures, using different names, but the substance was the same, particularly around the creation of humankind.
I need to hear more of this! Where have you read his work?