> Jim Michmerhuizen's query about stories is a neat insight: stories
> are the archetypal teaching device, so maybe interpreting life is "wired
> into" the human brain's functioning. Certainly every culture of which I'm
> aware uses stories to teach, with especially wonderful examples including
> Sufi tales, Zen koan and Biblical parables, no less than jokes and
> anecdotes. Commentary may explain, only to remove the delight of insight
> (gawd, my lit crit mentors would turn in their graves!), yet thinking
> together about different interpretations may also expand the ways to
> construe the wonderful stories we tell. Where do you come out, Jim?
Fence-sitting, comfortably. The question I'm occupied with is
epistemological: how can a story contain "knowledge"? How can singular
occurrences (real or imaginary) instruct us? And if they can instruct us,
how in the world does the instruction we derive from them relate to our
"general knowledge" - our grand theories and systems.
All the examples you cited in your note are part of this problem for me.
A story is a singularity. The events of a single dialogue make a unique
sequence in the lives of the participants.
As a bare minimum, then, a story is a kind of existence theorem: "This
happened." And therefore "This is a possible thread through the world".
And since our theories have to at least accommodate what is, they have to
accommodate what is in our stories. The storyteller chooses his stories
carefully, according to the needs of the auditor. Here is a man whose
view of the world does not seem to accommodate facts such as... and so I
must tell him the story of...
There is, truly, a role for the commentary and the critic. Because our
stories must necessarily play a role in the overall ecology of our
conceptual life: there must be free movement across the boundary between
story and "theory", and the role of the critic or commentator is to keep
that freedom alive. (Many, of course, fail at that, or see their role
differently.)
But it is true that in the intellectual life of the West, for centuries,
we have vastly overvalued general theory, as though it alone represented
knowledge (think of the disdain with which one sometimes hears used an
expression like "anecdotal"). Story has of course played the role that it
must in our actual social and cultural life; but we have consistently
misunderstood that role whenever we stopped to think about it.
Lastly, I suppose that this train of thought was initiated for me, at
least in part, by the notion sometimes expressed here that one needs to
have a "theory" of Learning Organizations in order to do anything. It
depends somewhat on what sort of thing you're willing to call a theory;
but certainly I don't think one needs to have a theory at all. One needs
to understand many things, of course; but that will show itself in our
stories.
Regards
jamzen@world.std.com
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