University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: July 19, 2007

By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer

A UB expert on folklore and American culture spoke about the complex role storytelling plays in everyone's lives during a lecture yesterday about the many ways stories create bonds within families—even if the "truth" of such stories only bears a passing resemblance to what really happened.

"We live in a world of stories," said Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and Samuel P. Capen chair of American Culture, who presented "The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories" as part of the UBThisSummer lecture series. His book of the same title will be out next month from Temple University Press.

"I've come to believe that the defining fact of a family is their shared body of stories," he said. "Get together at one of the major holidays, a birthday, a wedding or a funeral, and certain stories are hauled out, just as ornaments are hauled out every Christmas...When a newcomer joins the family group, the stories are opened up just like the family snapshot album."

Members of a group—a family, a tribe, a platoon, a private club, an athletic team or a rock band—share a common mass of information, Jackson said, so that names or references—opaque or meaningless to outsiders—conjure up a host of importation connections.

Such stories often mythologize people and events, he added, but their purpose is not so much to communicate literal truth as to access deeper meaning about how people view their place in a group.

Stories also surface based on the circumstances and the people who you're with, he said. Stories about someone who's deceased often emerge after a funeral, for example. Specific verbal cues, such as the phrase "remember the time when...," as well as the situation, clue listeners in to the sort of tale being told.

"Storytellings are social events," Jackson said. "The listener has not only to respond, but respond in the correct way. If you weep at the end of a humorous story or burst into giggles as someone is telling you about the miserable death of faithful Fido, people will think there's something wrong with you—and there very well may be."

Yet listeners, as well as storytellers, influence the interpretation of stories. For example, Jackson pointed out that over time, the stories of William Faulkner have risen in his estimation above those of Thomas Wolfe, who was a favorite of Jackson in his youth.

"It's not the voice that commands the story; it's the ear," said Jackson, quoting the Italian writer and novelist Italo Calvino.

Stories possess the "truth of utterance," he said, but are not dependable routes to the literal truth since the same story told to different listeners under different circumstances rarely produces the same interpretation. Eyewitnesses present some of the least reliable evidence, he added.

"Memory is an artist; memory is not a computer," said Jackson, noting that the human mind combines people and events, creates sometimes false connections, eschews clutter, economizes and "rounds the edges."

"Knowing about this process doesn't protect you from it one bit," he said. "Some things we do, we do because that is how we are hardwired. Unless something corrects us"—a tape recorder, a photograph—"we go for the better story...the story that best makes my point, the story that is most efficient."

"Stories are about truth," he said, "but not about facts."