I found a compelling 2026 book by Kevin Ashton titled The
Story of Stories: The million-year history of a uniquely human art at my
friendly local public library and have been reading through the very many
stories told in it. Google Books has a preview of just the first 16 pages.
There are eight chapters, titled as follows, containing lots of stories:
Chapter 1 A Million
Years of Stories 1
Chapter 2 The Eye of
Your Mind 34
Chapter 3 Pictures of
Sounds 59
Chapter 4 The War of
Stories 92
Chapter 5 The
All-Seeing Eye of Providence 136
Chapter 6 One One
Zero 169
Chapter 7 Death by a
Thousand Stories 210
Chapter 8 The
Hyperreal Thing 250
Here are four quotations from this book. The third section
in the first chapter, A Million Years of Stories, is titled The Universal
Story. It begins on page 6:
“Our storytelling brains, unchanged since they first
evolved, seek and tell stories that follow a simple pattern. This pattern is
universal to all cultures, genres, periods, storytellers, storytelling
technologies, and styles, and comprises three equally essential parts like the
legs of a stool.
First, all stories feature humanlike characters as the
agents of action. This is still true when the characters are supposed to be
nonhuman. Stories that star aliens, Anglepoise lamps, animals, ants, trains,
trees, and toasters are really about humans, which is why in stories these
creatures tend to walk on two feet, talk, have expressive faces and eyes, feel
human emotions, and set human goals. They are all rabbits in waistcoats –
people pretending not to be people. Even Dr. Suess, creator of fabulous, apparently
nonhuman characters including the Cat in the Hat, the Grinch, and Horton the
Elephant, said, ‘None of my animals are animals; they’re all people.’ These
humanlike characters are the story’s actors; they take the actions that cause
the story to happen. They live at or near the story’s center. They are
literally the people the story is about: it embraces, revolves around, and
surrounds them.
Second, all stories relate a chronology, a sequence of
events. The chronology does not have to be told in chronological order – it can
have flashbacks, flash-forwards, and meanwhiles – but it has to relate
connected events that happened at different moments. We would not call a
description of a dozen things that all occurred in the same second a story. A
story is always a journey through time.
Third, all stories must reach, or at least be headed for, a
resolution. The sequence of events must have a consequence, and that
consequence must arise from the actions of its human or humanlike agents. We
are compelled to give sequences of events consequences, to seek justice for our
characters, and to resolve unresolved stories. An unfinished story is like an
unscratched itch; if a story we care about is not explicitly resolves, or if we
have to wait to see how it ends because of a ‘to be continued’ cliffhanger
climax we will often try to finish the story ourselves by imagining possible
resolutions.”
The fifth section in the third chapter, Pictures of Sounds,
is titled The Ox and the House. It begins on page 69:
“We do not have to wonder whether Europeans could have found
a way to get from pictures of things to pictures of syllables: They tried. In
1400 BCE the Greeks adapted picture-based writing from another language,
Minoan, and used it almost entirely for accounting. Few Greeks could read it,
and even fewer could write it. Then around 1100 BCE, for reasons that are still
not well understood, Greek civilization collapsed, and the Greeks did not write
again for hundreds of years.
But while Greece slumbered in its dark ages, The Canaanites,
a seafaring people living in independent city-states in what is now Lebanon,
and parts of Israel, Palestine, and Syria, solved the problem of how to write
languages with clusters of consonants.
We can guess how it happened. Canaanites traded with, worked
for, and were sometimes enslaved by Egyptians. Some Canaanites learned to read
and write Hieratic, a simplified form of Egyptian hieroglyphics developed for
writing on papyrus, a writing surface made from a plant that grows in the
shallows of the Nile, with reeds dipped in ink. Hieratic was a flowing script
that could be written quickly by joining some characters together – a style now
known as cursive, after the Latin currere, ‘to run.’ Sometime around
1800 BCE, or possibly a few centuries earlier, one or more of the Canaanites
adapted Hieratic so that they could use it to write their own language too.
The adaptation was ingenious. The Canaanites selected
hieroglyphs of things whose names start with the sounds of the Canaanite
language and used the hieroglyphs to represent these sounds. For example, the
Canaanites’ word for ox was aleph, so they used the hieroglyph
for ox, which looked like an ox’s head, to represent an ‘a’ sound. Their word
for house was beth, so they used the hieroglyph for house, which
looked like the plan of a house, for the sound ‘b,’ and so on. If you were
Canaanite, and could identify what thing a character represented, you would
also know what sound that character represented, and could read.
Using characters to represent sounds instead of syllables
made the writing system very efficient, especially for consonant-laden
languages where most syllables are not also words. For example, every native
English speaker knows around twenty to thirty-five thousand words, created from
about three thousand syllables. A writing system for English that used one
character for each syllable would therefore need about three thousand distinct
characters. But those three thousand syllables are composed of only thirty-five
to forty-four distinct sounds, depending on what definition of sound you
use. And so, if you write sounds, not syllables, you can represent an entire
language in very few characters. That is what the Canaanites did, and it gave
them a complete writing system using just thirty-two characters.
The first two of those characters, aleph and beth,
the signs for ‘ox’ and ‘house,’ gave the Canaanites’ writing system its English
name, alphabet.
Some pictures the Canaanites chose are still discernible
today, thirty-five hundred years later, in the Latin alphabet used by 143
nations. For example, if you turn a capital A upside down, you can see
the head of the ox, horns and all; a capital B is the plan of a two-room
house, the letter c is a boomerang, gimel; l is from lamed,
a shepherd’s crook, m comes from mem, water, and is the shape of
two waves; and o is an eye, ‘ayin, now without the pupil of its
original Egyptian hieroglyph. These vestigial pictures exemplify how our tools
improve by evolution more than invention.”
The tenth section in the third chapter, Pictures of Sounds,
is titled The Secret Life of Stories. It begins on the bottom of page 87:
“Writing separates story and storyteller, and leaves readers
to determine a story’s meaning by themselves. One of the most important
consequences of this separation – and one that applies to all other forms of
mass communication too – is that every reader is likely to imagine and
interpret the same story differently. What the writer writes is not what the
reader reads.
And that raises a question: Is a story what is written or
what is read?
This is not a new concern. Literary theorist Roland Barthes,
among many others, wondered about it. Barthes concluded a story is not what is
written but what is read; so much so that he proclaimed the ‘death of the
author,’ saying: ‘The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make
up a writing are inscribed; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its
destination. The reader holds together the written text. To give writing its
future, the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the
author.’
Barthes argued that there are two kinds of story: the readerly
story, which requires little interpretation by the reader – the story is
readerly because the reader mainly reads – and the writerly story, which
requires lots of interpretation by the reader – the story is writerly because
the reader does so much interpretation that they almost write the story
themselves.
Or, some stories are so straightforward that they lead every
reader to imagine a similar story, and others are so ambiguous that they lead
every reader to imagine a different story. A stop sign is an example of
something extremely straightforward and readerly: Everyone who reads it
understands it the same way. A Rorschach test – a psychological test in which
someone is shown an image comprising nothing but inkblots and asked ‘What might
this be?’ – is an example of something extremely ambiguous and writerly:
Everyone who ‘reads’ it understands it differently. Neither of these two things
are stories, and no stories are as extreme as these two things, but every story
lies somewhere between.”
The fifth section in the fourth chapter, The War of Stories,
is titled Mass. It begins on page 112 and it says that:
“Printing came late to Europe, but when it arrived, the
consequences were much the same as in China, Japan, and Korea.
On the day Gutenberg’s printing press started operating,
scribes half a mile away were laboring in the scriptorium of St. Alban’s Abbey,
copying scriptures and other Christian writing using goose-feather quills
dipped in ink. The best and fastest of them, who were called antiquarii,
wrote one or two pages that day. In Gutenberg’s workshop, the printing press
produced three thousand pages. This wasn’t just a change in scale – it was a
revolution in how ideas could spread.
Europe’s scribes produced eleven million documents in the
thousand years before Gutenberg invented the printing press. Presses based on
Gutenberg’s design produced thirteen million documents by 1500. What once took
a century now took four years.
Gutenberg invented the mass production of mass
communication. His achievement established a pattern that repeats with each
successive storytelling technology: that the true transformation comes not from
the invention itself but from making it fast enough, cheap enough, and reliable
enough for mass adoption. Gutenberg’s press could produce thousands of pages
per day, but the revolution he started was not only because of speed or volume;
it was also because of what happens when one idea enters thousands of minds
simultaneously. That change is far more significant, and far more difficult to
quantify or even qualitize.”
The 1848 painting of Baku storytelling by August Wilhelm
Kiesewetter came from Wikimedia Commons.
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