ART AND RELIGION AS "STORY": REAL BUT NOT TRUE

Revised to reflect new primate research, Feb. 13, 1998,

and further edited in April, 2003.

by Paul R. Panton

For many years I have been fascinated by the existence of the phenomena of both oral history and folk tale traditions in many unique cultures around the world and have wondered why my exposure to them made me feel in touch with something profoundly significant to human existence.   The following is my attempt to bring together some thoughts and feelings I have about the existence of these stories and the connections I believe them to have with all other forms of non-procreative human expression.

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We tend to think of the word story as describing a verbal or written vehicle of communication, but surely the meaning of the word may be expanded to include any humanly generated expression in any medium.  The information can be simple, but it may also be complex.  I believe that story—simple and/or complex—is fundamental to human life and, in fact, is essential to it.  Certainly I believe it to be the only means, other than that achieved through genetic materials, of transmitting information from one human being to another and from one human generation to another. Indeed, I believe that the highly developed capacity to make and transmit story—surely a capacity which is genetically programmed—is that quality which most distinguishes us from other life forms. All human beings do seem to have an innate need to create and consume story.

Animals and plants engage in some forms of what we might call communication, but scientific study would seem to suggest that the behavioral communication between members of non-human life forms is largely pre-programmed in genetic codes and story transmissions remain substantially the same from generation to generation.  While recent research suggests that some other of the higher primates may have rudimentary capacity for story and that the brain centres for such may have evolved in our common ancestors, only human beings seem to have any substantial built-in capacity for the imaginative creation of story and the cognitive power to manipulate changes in it.

We usually think of story as narrative written or told and this is certainly the common understanding of the meaning of the word.  My Oxford dictionary, however, includes a secondary definition which it designates "obsolete": "A painting or sculpture representing a historical subject. Hence, any work of pictorial or sculptural art containing figures. -1700."  While this obsolete definition expands the meaning of the word beyond the idea of a verbal text, written or spoken, it only very slightly anticipates the definition that I intend.  My use of the word, story, is intended to include all information transmitted, other than by genetic code, in any medium by any human being to his gods or spirits or to other human beings. Thus, story, according to my definition, may include, painting, sculpture, prayer and all other verbal or written texts, dance, music, an algebraic equation, a geometric diagram, a videotape or a film or any other medium of expression used by humans.  I suppose that my definition means that I believe that all aspects of human cultural expression which are not genetically pre-programmed may be called story.

Prehistoric cave paintings may or may not be art, but they are certainly attempts to transmit information.  They may represent communication between groups or individuals or between human beings and entities in which they believe though these entities may be beyond apprehension by sensual means.  Whether or not we can verbally translate such cave paintings, we must surely agree that they represent stories, that in fact they are story and presume on some kind of comprehending audience.

We have been able to determine that at least some of the rock paintings or pictographs discovered in North America were made by aboriginal peoples who had spoken languages, but we cannot know as much about the peoples who created the oldest of known cave paintings on other continents.  However, we must not presume that spoken language was or is precursory to story.  I would rather suppose that the evolutionary step which made story possible triggered the evolutionary development of all mediums of expression, word speech perhaps being the most sophisticated, but not necessarily of earliest development. Whatever evolutionary step caused story to come into existence, I believe that the appearance of story in the lives of beings made those beings different and that these different beings—those who had story—were the first human beings.  In my view it is the degree to which our species has developed story—though the impetus may pre-exist us—that distinguishes us from all other life.  And the mediums through which our human story may be transmitted are many and the medium itself may sometimes be the story.

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Sometime in late years of the century just past I found myself realising that the art of painting, at its best, was always about painting.  No matter what the literal subject matter of a painting might be, good paintings are only good because they are primarily about painting itself. But even the product of the act of painting is a message which we may designate as story, for all of the expressive acts performed by human beings are at least an expression of the story "I exist". Surely we can identify the earliest human beings as those beings first having a capacity to transmit this message in an other-than-procreative medium. Just what might be the evolutionary advantage which emerges from this other-than-procreative urge to self-express remains a mystery at this point, but a capacity for some degree of self-expression seems to be something we associate with psychologically healthy human individuals.

Healthy human individuals may also require a capacity for the consumption of the products of human self-expression. This would certainly provide a justification for its evolutionary development and might explain the perpetuation of self-expression and its products in all human cultures.  Surely human communities can be regarded in some sense as groups of individuals able to offer each other and receive from one another reassurances of existence.

Isolated human communities down through the ages seem to have named their family groupings, clans or tribes by words which are always translatable as "the people" or "the human beings". The story of these people, whatever the medium, was surely an expression of "we exist" and/or an attempt to describe, understand or explain existence.  Taken altogether, their story repertoire could be seen as their philosophy of life or belief system and perhaps without too great a stretch be understood as their religion.

It is my contention that there are those who have a self-conscious awareness of the existence of the phenomenon of story and the role it plays as a mechanism in the lives of the members of the human species. And while as observers we do not believe that art or religion, as story, is true, we certainly believe that story—and therefore art and religion—is real.

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