I ask myself about that primal human need: why did human beings, way back in the beginning, need someone to tell stories? And I ask myself about the same need in the middle of the 21st century: Why is the need still there? I would like to hazard a path towards a possible answer, one that could shed some light on the role of oral story-tellers in today’s world.
It is tempting to say that story-tellers existed and continue to exist because they pass on popular memory and identity. Although this may be a commonplace, it is nonetheless true. However, it is quite likely that handing stories down in this way has almost always occurred naturally, without any premeditation by the story-teller or awareness of it by the listener. In other words, I am not so sure that the stories were told because everyone knew that those tales, myths, or legends ought to be kept alive in popular memory, and as such the community needed story-tellers. I doubt any awareness of that role in the past and I doubt that people today who listen to stories have these matters on their mind. And yet, through story-telling, memory, identity, and a sense of community get passed on anyway. I think of those little fish who hitch a ride on the back of a whale. The whale (the story-teller) may or may not be bothered by this and may or may not notice them, but the fish will still get their ride because the whale has no way of shaking them off. Memory and identity are the stowaways of story-telling. But either way, I am not convinced that passing on memory and identity were what the community were asking story-tellers to do in the past. I also think it’s not what they ask for now.
We might consider entertainment: the tribe, the family, the town would all want to have a good time, and without nightclubs or cinemas, or bars or stadiums, the story-teller had a role. This seems much more logical: we get bored, but if someone could tell us a story, we wouldn’t be so bored. However, this role was also fulfilled (and probably with greater success) by those who could make music, or those who could dance, and later on by jesters, acrobats, actors, puppeteers, comedians, and entertainers. If the role of story-tellers had been to entertain, I don’t think they could have survived the competition. Nowadays it would be a lost art form. But what we see is that every day there are more story-tellers, festivals, and narrative spaces.
And so the question is Why? Why did communities need to have story-tellers?
Maybe it was it for education? But they already had wise elders, masters, and teachers for this purpose. Was it to use stories as a vehicle to deliver moral and ethical teaching, standards of behaviour, or social norms? Perhaps, but priests, judges, chiefs, older people, and adults in general also had that role. So why did communities specifically need there to be story-tellers? Simply out of the need to know stories? Of course, but then the story-tellers could have disappeared when writing came in, but that never happened. Then came radio, cinema, television, YouTube, Netflix and Spotify, and yet the number of story-tellers never stops growing.
Why did and why do communities seek out story-tellers?
Clearly the figure of the story-teller can embody many of the aspects mentioned above (stories, entertainment, symbols, memory, identity, morality, education, etc.), and that contributes in part to the fact that we are not extinct yet. But I don’t think that any of those things are what is essential. I endeavour to look further back, much further back. I think that in earliest times, when the nomadic tribe found a good cave and lit a fire to get through the night, when those men and women implored one of their own (with words, with looks, with silence) to tell a story, what they were looking for was something much more simple than all those things we have contrived in recent years to justify our art.
It was something that was linked to mere survival: all they wanted was to keep awake, because wild beasts were roaming outside.
In the beginning, the mission of the story-teller was to keep the adults awake.
That was what the community wanted from the story-teller, because for as long as they were awake, the fire wouldn’t go out, and if the fire didn’t go out, the beasts would keep their distance, and if it was winter, they wouldn’t perish in the cold. And in order to fulfil this important role, the story-teller would talk, tell tales, recall, invent, repeat, shout, go quiet, gesticulate, imitate, howl, hesitate, ask, listen, and start again. It wasn’t something that anyone could do, and not any story would suffice. If the tribe were not interested in the story, they would feel sleepy (and that put everyone at risk). The story-teller would think, select, choose, and improve, and above all would repeat stories that worked, those that his predecessor would tell. He was not concerned about passing down memory or identity; he was not concerned about whether he was educating anyone, he wasn’t even thinking about that. Keeping his people awake was the only thing he really cared about: it was a matter of life and death.
Over time (and when I say time, I mean centuries; I mean millennia), the best stories, those that kept the audience alert for longest, the most popular stories, the most requested, would travel along the ways and reach the story-tellers of other places. Obviously, the stories that made the deepest impression on human hearts were those that survived. Stories became increasingly important and earned their place outside of the cave, beyond the fear of the wild beasts, because they said important things, because they contained wisdom, law, paths, questions. Some of these ancient tales worked thanks to their story-tellers; the majority, despite their story-tellers. At some point in history, with large and densely-populated cities, with so many story-tellers and stories going around, it became ever more important to be a good story-teller in order to stand out: to know how to capture an audience, often made up of strangers, in a public space. But as there were no longer so many dangers, as people could now sleep safely in their homes, the role of professional story-tellers was no longer so clear. The community already had the tales and anyone could tell them. Now each family could choose its story-tellers: a grandparent, an aunt, a neighbour. A professional story-teller (an artist) was no longer required. Then people had stories in books, in libraries, in bookshops, in films, on the radio, on television, and story-tellers lost their monopoly over stories. And yet they never disappeared. In the 20th century they had to re-invent themselves and compromise, it’s true: the promotion of reading became something of a Faustian pact for oral story-tellers. Books gave them an opportunity to survive: talk about me, and I shall rejuvenate you. Story-tellers seized this lifeline and since then have started to dedicate themselves, to a large degree, to telling stories to encourage children to read. Governments – some more than others – were prepared to put money in, but not to fund story-telling for adult audiences, which for a long time (at least in Latin America) was relegated to informal spaces, almost never remunerated, in bars or squares or university campuses, and sometimes in cultural centres or libraries, but with such a loyal following that ultimately it inspired groups to set up festivals where story-telling for adults was always on the bill, with shows that were normally packed.
In summary: story-tellers never gave up telling stories for adults, and adults never gave up listening to them. Why? Why did they prepare (and still prepare) stories for adults under such limited and poorly-paid conditions? Why do we defend this profession tooth and nail, and refuse to let it become just a branch of reading animation, or just something aimed at children? Where do story-tellers get their profound and deeply-rooted conviction that what we do is not just important, but essential?
And why, when there are shows for adults, does the audience respond so well?
I believe that the answer goes right back to the beginning: this is the twenty-first century and we no longer live in caves, but the wild beasts have not gone away and someone has to keep the community awake. The beasts might not have fangs any more, but deep within them everything remains dark. Maybe what kept them at bay was never the fire, but rather a united community. The story-teller tells the story and the audience feel that they are part of a wider whole, even if they have never met before. In contrast to other art forms, such as theatre, a story-teller doesn’t seek to make you uncomfortable: the intention is to find a place where people want to remain, ideally all through the night, because for as long as we are together, no beast will be able to devour us.
Story-tellers offer the only thing they have, which is words. Those words have travelled from very far away to offer humans a sense of every epoch. The community attends story-telling sessions not to encourage themselves to read, but because in the depths of their hearts they feel the need to learn to face up to the wolf, and they want to do so in the company of others so that the wolf will stay away while they are still learning to vanquish it. And in order to do that, they need to trust each other, and before they can trust they need to feel that they are in a space, a place, in a context that is real.
In a story, nothing is true and yet there is no deceit. Everything the story-teller says is true. The intimate and shared emotions are true. There are no promises about the future or revisions of the past, because the story-teller is talking about paths that even though no one knows them, we have all walked down; about woods in which no one has got lost, but where we have all found ourselves alone at times; about beasts that cannot exist in the real world, and yet appear to be worryingly recognizable. When we doubt everything we are told and all the images we see and the authorship of every text, hearing someone standing on a stage telling an age-old tale is, as Estrella Ortiz used to say, to return to the true word, amid so many unwanted messages we hear.
What do the audience want when they listen to a story being told and give story-tellers a role beyond encouraging people to read? Or to put it another way: what does a story-telling session offer that no other art or leisure activity offers?
We are driven to listen to stories by a kind of unconscious certainty: for as long as there is someone telling stories; for as long as there is an audience listening to stories; for as long as we are together defending our freedom to create, imagine, and lose ourselves in the woods of our stories; for as long as we build spaces of Truth, the beasts will never be able to get close, because when someone tells a story, a fire is lit, and the heat from that fire stays with us for a long time, and the memory of that fire allows us to see the lies, the manipulation, and the hate of today’s world, and also the truth, the beauty, and the love; to distinguish, as Italo Calvino used to say, in the midst of hell what is not hell, and to nurture it and give it space.
Those of us who tell stories know that we have a key to hope in a world dominated by the most terrible beasts, who always come back, never tiring.
We need to light that bonfire all around; fill the world with stories, because to tell a story, to listen to a story, is increasingly an act of resistance.
That is why, I believe, the community still wants story-tellers.
That is why we still exist.
And I think that being aware of this role can answer many questions about the reach our profession has.
Andrés Montero (Santiago de Chile, 1990). Writer and oral story-teller, author of the books ‘El año en que hablamos con el mar’, ‘La muerte viene estilando’ or the essay ‘Por qué contar cuentos en el siglo XXI’, inter alia. By 2027, his books will have been translated into more than ten languages. Since 2012 he has dedicated himself to telling stories professionally, and is a founder of the La Matrioska Company, with which he has taken his stories across Chile and to festivals, fairs, and gatherings in over fifteen countries in America and Europe. He has trained as a story-teller with different masters, from which we may highlight the Chilean Paty Mix and the Spaniard Pep Bruno. On stage, he tells both his own stories and those of the universal oral tradition. As a teacher, he has run over 30 initiation workshops on oral story-telling in Santiago de Chile and ten courses or creative writing. Together with Nicole Castillo, he runs the Escuela Casa Contada, presents the television programme ‘Los cuenteros en ruta’, and he co-ordinates the International Oral Story-telling Festival ‘ChileCuentos’.
