17 October 2011 A definition of a story
The American writer Barry Lopez has written some amazing stories. I wish he’d write more — I’ve read all that I can find but am still hungry.
His collection Field Notes includes one called “The Entreaty of the Wiideema,” in which the narrator spends a long time with an Australian group of aborigines of that name. I won’t say anything about the plot, because you should read this and Lopez’s other admirable stories yourself! But this is one conclusion that his narrator reaches.
“ And I finally came to see the Wiideema as a version of something of which my own people were a version. What we shared. . .was a sense of danger. A sense that it was dangerous to be alive. . . . Human consciousness beckons us all. My Wiideema companions. . .had not accepted it fully. They didn’t shun knowledge, and it was not that they were never contemplative or curious about ideas or other abstractions. But their hesitancy had led them in another direction. All that they knew, all they believed or imagined, they cast in stories. Stores for them were the only containers for what consciousness, as we have it, might have elucidated for them about life [emphasis added].”
The story as a container for knowledge, belief, imagination — that I can understand.
