Storytelling Our Way to Happiness

While I was cleaning today, I accidentally ripped an old graying piece of paper stuck on the side of my refrigerator. Before throwing it away, I read it over. I kept it because of how it presented the ideas of the philosopher, Richard Rorty, on the need for storytellers. If you have a philosophical bent or a belief in the value of storytelling, read on.

In his ideal of self-creation ... Rorty's new twist is to stress language and literature. The task, as he sees it is to replace the descriptions and labels imposed on us by others – family, professions, culture – with our own descriptions, our own language. We create ourselves by telling our own story.

For Rorty, this isn't so much a matter of giving form to the accidental tangle of compulsions, desires and roles that we crudely refer to with the pronoun "I." It's a matter of self-enlargement and self-enrichment – of maximizing possibilities and experiences. "Do I contradict myself?" Whitman wrote. "Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes)." This is the sort of picaresque story – full of richly diverse and dissonant impulses and adventures – that Rorty thinks we should be telling about ourselves. To help us do it, we won't have much use for traditional philosophers. What we need are storytellers whose writing gives examples of self-transformation, and poets and poetic philosophers who generate new metaphors for imagining ourselves.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the question of women's happiness. I wrote about the recent study and my ideas on the subject in another blog here. As I said there, I think a big problem is that the narratives are still the same as they were 30 years ago when the world was much different. They do not serve us in thinking about ourselves or our lives today. The mismatch between the cultural narrative and the individual's life, for women especially, creates a friction that rubs raw those who live according to the mainstream narrative and leaves them unsatisfied with themselves and their lives. This quote by Rorty just reinforces my belief that it is more important than ever that women and men tell their stories, put them out on the internet in blogs and videos. I can hope that this grass roots avalanche of alternative narrative will nudge the mainstream entertainment leviathan. Even a miniscule change in course will take us to an entirely new place over time.

BTW, I think the quote is from an article in the New York Times Magazine from 1990 called "Every Man a Philosopher" but I'm not sure. All I can find are phrases quoted that match the bit of paper I clipped out. The bibliography for one such quote lists: Klepp, L.S. (1990). Every man a philosopher. The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 2, 1990. So we'll go with that unless somebody tells me otherwise.