Abstract
In what follows I will be using Native American culture and literature as the primary focus for a discussion of storytelling. For this culture, the life of speech and the presencing of meaning through the sharing of stories is vital to the very existence and identity of a people. Momaday’s remarks about the nature of the relationship between language and experience surely is not limited to the lives of Native Americans. His accompanying claim that we cannot exist apart from the moral dimension of language is no less applicable to our own culture, but showing the importance of an awareness of this condition requires a bracketing of the cultural insensibility that pervades the routine of our lives. The interest of this paper is not in Native American culture or literature as such, but what lessons it may have for a dominant culture which has forgotten the sense of, or lost the genius for, telling stories.
Telling stories is an act by which Man strives to realize his capacity for wonder, meaning and delight.…. The possibilities of storytelling are precisely those of understanding the human experience.1 N. Scott Momaday
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Notes
“The Man Made of Words,” N. Scott Momaday, in The Remembered Earth, ed. Geary Hobson. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980, p. 168.
Both Aristotle and St. John recognized logos (word) as fundamental or instrumental to understanding the nature of human being. We should record, however, that the primal character of logos is not limited to the agendas of either theology (“God”), or philosophy (“Reason”).
This idea now has a place even in analytic philosophy; see After Virtue, Alasdair Maclntyre. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 205 ff.
F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1967, Section 23.
“Of Truth and Lies,” F. Nietzsche, in Philosophy and Truth, ed. D. Breazeale. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979, p. 84.
The Will To Power, F. Nietzsche, ed. W. Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1967, p. 481.
K. Marx, The German Ideology, Volume One, Preface (1845). See also Communist Manifesto (1848).
Freud’s most specific treatment of errors (“Fehlleistungen”) in language and intention occurs in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; but Freud’s whole analysis of “the unconscious” is relevant to this point as it is developed in The Interpretation of Dreams.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1979, p. 3.
Recall that the wood nymph asked for and was granted immortality. This gift of the god was, however, no blessed thing for a creature subject to the ravages of time.
Apparently Joyce intended to writes a fourth book in which mythic language would find a final place — following the scheme of development of Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, and Finnegan’s Wake. The book was never written.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 175.
Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry,Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Momaday’s major works relevant to this discussion are The Names, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1976 and The Way to Rainy Mountain, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969.
Silko’s major works relevant to this discussion are Storyteller, New York: Seaver Books, 1981 and Ceremony, New York: Penguin Books, 1986.
L. M. Silko, Storyteller, p. 110.
Paula Gunn Allen, Grandmothers of the Light, Boston: Beacon Press, 1991, p. 7.
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, Preface.
Silko, Storytellers, p. 94.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene I.
G. Vizenor, Wordarrows, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978, p. 117.
The Remembered Earth, p. 167.
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Kimmel, L. (1998). Telling Stories. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Reincarnating Mind, or the Ontopoietic Outburst in Creative Virtualities. Analecta Husserliana, vol 53. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4900-6_12
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