January 27, 2013, by Stephen Mumford
Professor Slug
Storytelling is a wonderful thing. While it serves no practical purpose it is something that takes our disposable income, for novels, films, plays and comic books. And we all have stories of our own, from favourite anecdotes brought out at family gatherings to the more serious narrative we construct about our lives as a whole. Is storytelling a deep-seated human need? Very often it is the most important part of a culture to be preserved through the ages, as Nordic saga did, along with myths and legends of the classical age. I am hoping to get more insight into the importance of storytelling in civilisation from National Storytelling Week, being promoted by the Society for Storytelling.
Here is my own little contribution. A week ago I was walking in the snow with my 12-year old, Oliver, taking him to his friend’s for a sleepover. Walking is a great opportunity for talking and we ran through a variety of random subjects. Kids are great at letting their imaginations roam freely.
‘Dad, what if you woke up as a slug?’ came a question, seemingly from nowhere. But I’ve learnt from experience bringing up children that you just have to go with it. ‘Would you just immediately throw yourself into some salt to kill yourself?’
Now that is a difficult question. If I were somehow transformed into a slug, from being a human, I might indeed think it was not worth going on with life. But real slugs, I take it, have no conception of a better life and thus harbour no silly suicidal thoughts. So I didn’t know for sure the answer to his question but it was probably no.
‘But what if you dreamed you were a slug’, was his next question, ‘and knew of a better life as a philosophy professor?’ Sure, it wouldn’t make much sense to be such a former-philosopher slug, but nonsense often does seem to make perfect sense while you are still in the dream.
Now we were both getting interested in the scenario. What would a philosopher think about as a slug? Then I wanted to add a further twist to the story. ‘How do I know’, I queried, ‘that I am not now already a slug; but one that is dreaming he is professor of philosophy?’
And thus was born the story of Professor Slug. As we completed the journey, we added more and more detail to the story of this unusual professor. Gradually he became a well-respected researcher and teacher at a leading university: a slug delivering his lectures in miniature academic robes.
I dropped Ollie off at his friend’s house but when I collected him the next morning the first thing we wanted to talk about was Professor Slug and some of his amazing subsequent adventures. Another possibility was that he was indeed no more than dreaming of being a philosopher but used the knowledge he gained from his dreams to teach all the other slugs about philosophy.
Professor Slug occupied all our return journey and has now being added to the family pantheon of fictional characters. He enriched our lives for those fleeting moments, bringing us together in construction of a fun little story while walking in the snow. It is activities such as storytelling that make life worth living. And I have just enjoyed telling you this story: the story of the story of Professor Slug.
Dear Professor Slug,
Eh? Storytelling ‘serves no practical purpose’? Clearly a rhetorical introduction, but luckily your own anecdote belies this bald and provocative generalisation twice over. Firstly, you note that it makes ‘life worth living’ – what more practical purpose could there be than that? And secondly your anecdote makes clear that your story of Professor Slug could serve as a very useful way of inducting your offspring into the family business. Nowadays he may have a choice, and he may not want to be a professor of philosophy, let alone a Dean, when he grows up. But just imagine if you were a wheelwright with a thriving business which you needed him to work in first and then take over in due course…telling the story of how you became one and what you do would be part of his training. (As wheelwrights in the past, so A-listers today tend to keep things in the family).
There are many other examples of practical purposes that storytelling serves. ‘The Nordic saga’ (thanks for the mention, though I wonder exactly what you mean by this phrase) is just one. In the days before Wikipedia, sagas (and there are several kinds) encoded and transmitted all kinds of information that people needed (and wanted) to know: genealogical, geographical, historical. Then later on, other people wanted to know these things too, though often for different reasons, as indeed we want to know them today, which is why I have a job professing these things.
So, storytelling is one trickle of delicious liquid slaking the great human thirst for knowledge. The taste and the function go together, in a most practical way. Who wouldn’t rather have the mead, or wine, or real ale of storytelling, than the water of a chart or table or diagram, or the cola of Wikipedia, rotting your teeth.
Best regards,
Professor Saga
“We’re all just stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?” (obligatory Doctor Who quote).
Stories do more IMO than make life worthwhile, they’re an important way we give life meaning. We take the wonder and/or horror of life and create a narrative, so we can understand and live with it. The danger is that we take the story too seriously, and abstract ourselves away from the raw truth & uncertainty. But make a story we must.
To me, this ties in with Nietzsche’s eternal Reoccurance – is what we are doing right now part of our narrative? I also think of the end of Phillip Pullman’s “Golden Compass” series, where the test for release and oblivion is that your life IS a story. A co-authored effort between you and a unaware universe.
A wise leader of a special-needs play group told me many years ago that ‘everything is story’. The older I get, the more true I believe it to be. If we cannot tell ourselves our own story, there is no meaning in anything else.
I saw The Life of Pi at the cinema on Sunday. It’s a film very much about storytelling …