By JG Hanks
Staff
Reprinted from the September 4, 2011 edition of The Meridian Star’s Meridian 360 Edition
History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.
— Voltaire
Oral narrative is a concept reserved exclusively for humans and is the basis of the continuation of cultures and society. While watching Tim Burton’s wonderful film Big Fish with my wife and niece this past weekend, I started to think about all of the stories that have been passed down through the generations in my family and how I will continue this tradition into the future. Remembering how my grandfather confronted the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, the events that led to meeting my wife, whether or not my landlord in Sicily really was in the Mafia, why Johnny Cash was at a wedding with my mother in-law, the exploits of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox and even the six, no seven, stolen bases in one game I swiped as a kid brought back not only the memories of the events, but how the stories were (and will be) told.
In Big Fish, Will Bloom becomes so annoyed by the constant stories that his father Edward has repeated over and over again since his childhood, that he stops talking to him for three years. He is worried that nothing his father ever told him was the truth and he may soon become nothing more than a storyteller to his own children, leading to their distrust of him. When he finds out his father is ill, he heads back home, and begins to recount many of the tales his father has told him over the years. Looking at them from a different perspective, he realizes that his father simply loved telling stories and his tales will allow him to live forever. With this new found knowledge, Will then passes on many of the stories that his father had told him to his own children, continuing the cycle and fulfilling his father’s wishes.
Much like Will Bloom, we as children probably heard many fantastic tales from our parents and relatives, of which many were surely a stretch from the actual truth. Of those stories, how many have we proudly passed on to our own families and friends, while surely changing a few minor details and stretching the truth a little more ourselves? By doing this and making them more of our own, the act of telling the story becomes just as important as the story itself. Thus the stories that we hear become an important part of our own history and the history of our future generations. The next time an older relative tells us a story that we feel has been told a million times, instead of rolling our eyes and feigning interest, we should marvel at the yarns being spun, watch and listen as history is spelled out for us right before our eyes by someone who has lived to tell the tale. History is living all around us; we just need to take the time to listen.
Do not applaud me. It is not I who speaks to you, but history which speaks through my mouth.
— Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges
