Erlebnis of Story

Abstract

Of story, J. Hillis Miller writes, “Nothing seems more natural and universal to human beings that telling stories. Surely there is no human culture, however ‘primitive,’ without its stories and habits of storytelling …” (66). Roland Barthes goes so far as to say, “… narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative…. Narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural; it is simply there, like life itself” (78). if what Hillis Miller and Barthes observe is true, and few activities are as basic to human life as storytelling, why — relatively speaking — has so little attention been paid to story? Hillis Miller believes it has been ignored because being “so natural, so universal,” story seems so elementary and unproblematic. Along with Hillis Miller, however Barthes concludes “that, far from the abandoning of any idea of dealing with narrative on the grounds of its universality” (80), it is story’s universality that demands our attentions: “For example, why is it that narration is so universal, present in all human beings everywhere? … Exactly what psychological or social functions do stories serve? Just why do we need stories, lots of them, all the time? The answers to those questions are not so east to reach” (Hillis Miller 67).