One of the things I plan on writing about in my Story-Systems blog is this idea that humans are the “story-telling animal.” Essentially, that stories are how we organize and communicate experience through language and sequence. Towards that end, I’m doing a little preliminary research on the phrase “story-telling animal” for background. Likely what I will do in the future is use this blog for working out ideas which will then take on a more finished form at the Story-Systems blog.

In any event, on with the quotes!

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man — let me offer you a definition — is the story-telling animal. Whereever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker — buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories, he has to keep making them up. As long as there’s a story , it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall — or when he’s about to drown — he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his life. [Source]

Our central thesis, borrowed from Alasdair Macintyre (1981) is that man is in his actions and practice? essentially a story-telling animal. Human memory is story-based. Ours is a world of stories. We know them, find them, reconsider them, use them to understand the world and to operate in the world, [and] adapt them to new purposes (Shank, 1990). Boje (1995) characterized the work of contemporary organizations as making sense of the storylines within them. In sum, people do not just tell stories: they tell stories to enact an account of themselves and their community. Stories shape the course and meaning of human organization. [Source]

“The first sign that a baby is going to be a human being and not a noisy pet comes when he begins naming the world and demanding the stories that connect its parts.”

… “Nothing passes but the mind grabs it and looks for a way to fit it into a story…. Feverish for order, our minds seek not only a unified field theory, a pencil by the telephone and a punch line to the joke. We want to make sense out of the greatest mystery all of us must face—ourselves. As W. H. Auden said, ‘What we have not named or beheld as symbol escapes our notice.’”

[…] “we are searching for coherence and continuity; as a result we tend to minimize anything which interrupts the ‘flow’ of the narrative.
Because we are searching for narrative truth, we are always attempting to write the best possible ’story’ from the available data…” [Source]

Absent the stories of others, how will we know them? Absent our own stories, how will we know ourselves? Story is inherent to human experience; we are the story-telling animal. Story is the means by which we learn, by which we make meaningful experience from the events of our lives together. The stories we are able to tell ourselves and others, those we can understand and imagine, carry our identity, our culture. They define what we believe to be possible in our individual and collective lives. [Source]

People love stories. They spend most of their time telling and hearing them. Dr. Walter Fisher, a professor at USC, said that in addition to being homo sapiens or rational creatures, human beings are homo narrans or storytelling creatures. In fact, he argues that stories are the key identifying feature of human beings, because they are used by people to understand others, and themselves. [Source]

“Let me tell you the story about …” There is something magical about those words. In one form or another they go back to the dawn of civilization, to evenings around the camp fire as the group listened to tales of its ancestors, of dangers faced and trials endured, epic events and heroic deeds. As children, we loved the bedtime story with its scary moments and happy ending. Nor do we lose that fascination as we grow up, though the stories become more nuanced and complex. A story imposes order on the chaos of events. Out of the ragged threads of time, it weaves a text with a beginning, middle and an end. As long as we seek meaning, we will tell stories, and they will shape our imagination. Mankind is the story-telling animal. [Source]

Alasdair MacIntyre, the American philosopher, claims the ability to follow stories is connected with the ability to make sense of human experience. Our lives are intelligible only within narratives, observing that “man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal” (1981, p54). ‘Storytelling’ and ‘Play’ are the cornerstones of early learning and young children can be both the recipients of story and the storytellers. Margaret Meek in On Being Literate (1991) concludes “if we are to understand the relation of storytelling to literacy, we must see the value and nature of narrative as a means by which human beings everywhere, represent and structure the world” (p103). Stories give a framework for children’s cognitive development. Through story children can learn structures for thinking and it is through narrative that connections can be made to otherwise unrelated information which can be held in the memory for longer than if acquired piecemeal (Cooper and McIntyre 1992, Howe 1999 and Gardner 2000 in Grugeon and Gardner 2000). Stories can be a source for encouraging abstract and reflective thought and in generic terms children can learn how to organise and structure their ideas, concepts and thinking processes. [Source]