All the World's A Stage: Storytelling and Truth

By Brandon Korosh, Library Manager
February 13, 2019
Orpheus at the entrance of Orcus

Orpheus at the entrance of Orcus; NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 1624051

In As You Like It, Shakespeare pens, through the character Jacques, the well-known saying "all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players." No doubt, to continue to channel his sentiment, we are all actors with our exits and entrances in this play called life, but like Shakespeare—whether we’ve ever put pen to paper, (or nowadays, fingers to keyboard) to spin a yarn or not—we’re all storytellers as well. 

Most people are apt to draw a distinction between fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, and rightfully so. But throughout history, this line has been blurred and arguably remains fluid.
We say "knowledge is power" and while this is true, we don’t just mean the titles filed under nonfiction in the Library catalog. Stories are not only wellsprings of knowledge themselves, from the beginning, "real" or "fictitious," they have been the vehicle—what starts in one capacity can and has transferred over to the next, and vice versa while, to our brains, the difference is often moot. 

Think about a time when a story pulled you in. When you became so invested with one you felt what its characters felt, jumped when they jumped, wept as they wept, or simply had to know how things panned out. This is your brain on stories—we’re neurologically wired for them. And while you may not consider yourself a storyteller, neuroscience and other fields that deal with theories of the mind—from the way our memory works to the way we learn—may beg to differ, asserting that, in a strange way, we are our stories.

From a basic survival standpoint, our capacity to recognize patterns and form an inference from them was of major evolutionary advantage to us—it gave us the ability to communicate where possible danger might lie or where resources were to be had, ultimately leading to the invention of fables and myths, which sought to explain the world around us. 
In the modern world, it’s also what makes stories so engaging. Stick a person in an fMRI machine while they’re engrossed in a story (assuming it’s a good one), and they’ll look more like a participant than an observer, with the same neurotransmitters and brain regions being implicated. Grab a sample of their blood and, if it's a romantic story, you’ll find elevated levels of dopamine and oxytocin; if it’s scary, more cortisol and adrenaline. 

Philosophers have written about these notions for centuries. The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Protagoras spoke of "Human[s]... [being] the measure of all things;" the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche described "nature… [being] acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us;" the French philosopher Michel Foucault spoke of "epistemes," or the cultural and linguistic baggage we cannot escape; and Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida talked about everything being in the text.
The sentiment has been expressed innumerable times by countless thinkers. At base, what they have all said and are saying is this: our processes for understanding are self-referential, and more an act of creation and reinvention than discovery.
We are hardwired for storytelling from the micro to the macro—viewing the world through the lens of language and the stories we tell ourselves using its grammar. As with a Rorschach, mirror, or lens, the stories we create and share directly affect how we see the world and our places in it. Romantic or realistic, epistolary or scientific, stories are the looking glass which reflects us to ourselves and others.

What then of truth? To turn again to Nietzsche:

[nothing more than] a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms… a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.

or, in a word: story. 
You can check out information on storytelling-related programs at your local NYPL branch here, and find out more about the philosophers featured in this post with this list of recommended books:

The Hero with A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis

Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault

The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall

The Nietzsche Reader edited by Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large

Theaetetus / Plato translated by John McDowell; with an introduction and notes by Lesley Brown