THE NATURE OF STORY: LITERATURE REVIEW

ROBERT GOLDSPRING

The story of Story is a tale worth telling, and many a teller has woven the threads of
the great weaving in an attempt to achieve this task. In seeking to understand the
function of story, I first created my pattern upon which to base my understanding. For
this pattern I chose the ancient archetype of the tree. I began with tales and narratives
– let us call these the fruits. I went further through cultures and peoples – let us call
these the leaves. I went further still with the boughs and branches of languages, and
then I came to the main trunk which represented stories as tools of learning and
representation.

Yet still the mystery remained – What is the Nature of Story? Now it is these key
words that the door to this mystery may be unlocked. For it is the Roots of Words that
the spell can be broken. The etymology of the word Story comes from the Latin
Historia, (Harper 2001: Online – all subsequent etymological definitions from the
same source) which means - Tale. Yet its roots run deeper through the Proto-Indo-
European (PIE) Wid-tor > Weid and to the Sanskrit Veda which means - To Know.
Weid is also the root of the word Vision. So Story’s literal roots mean “I see” ……
Oh I see! As a side note, the Veda’s of Hindu Historical Cosmology are great stories
that are the repositories of ancient knowledge.

Now if we look at the roots of the word Nature we have find the Latin Nasci which
means - To be born. Yet seeking deeper into the soil of the past we have the PIE root
of Gene > Genus which draws from the Sanskrit Janati, which means – To bear ….
May I be lyrical and add - To Bear Fruit!

It is here that I come to the crux of my seeking. If Nature is the fruit that is born, yet
Story is also the fruit, then maybe Story is not the fruit, but the seeds contained with
the fruit. So here we have Story represented in the continuous cycle of Seed, Tree,
Fruit and the Earth to which it falls, and which Bears the Seed once more. Life as
Metabolism and Reproduction! So…. Story is akin to Life, and in seeking the Nature
of Story, I believe, we must look further than the branches of human language and the
leaves of culture. We must look beyond the human to the nature of Nature.

The story of Story can be found within the Nature of Nature. To look at it
etymologically, the knowing of story can be found in the birth of nature. Story is akin
to Life, Story is Alive. So in my Literature Review I have not looked at the texts of
the Historians, the Philosophers, the Educators, the Scholars and the Linguists. I have
looked at those who seek to know the Story of the Earth.

At the deepest roots of humanities search for answers to the Cosmos and their place
within it, we have the Primeval Story of ‘The Tree of Life’. Far older than the Genesis
account (again we see the root Gene) are the archaic myths of the Tree that connects
Heaven and Earth – the Axis Mundi or World Tree that bears the fruits of nations.

The World Tree is the Cosmic Pillar from which life began and around which the
Earth turns. Professor’s of the History of Science, Georgio de Santillana and Hertha
von Dechend, in their epic tome “Hamlet’s Mill” (1977), speak of the navel of the
world or the nail of heaven that is the pole star around which the axis of the earth
turns as it makes its precessional cycle through the great cosmic story of the night sky.
This tree is sacred to to the Norse, the Maia, the Australian Aboriginal, the Ancient
Chinese, the Dogon of Africa – just to name a few. It is the tree from which Odin
gained Wisdom and the portal between worlds ……. And is this not where story
comes from? This archetypal other world? The place of Magic and the Realm of the
Imagination

Like the trunk of a tree, the world-pole is something through

which life flows. If a man or woman — a shaman, a hero, a
prophet — would ascend to the heavens or descend to the underworld,
here is the stairwell. Here the adept can powow with gods and animals,
even merge with them, as all of us used to do at the beginning of time.
(Eisenberg 2001:111)

So the tree is the symbol, but the message is one of creation and the sustained being of
life. Like Eisenberg, von Dechend and Santillana, scholars such as E.O. James (1968),
Russel (1981) and McDonald (2002) explore the image of the Tree of Life as it
depicts the representation of the Epic Story of Life and the connection between
Heaven and Earth. Archetypes are the landscape of story and Trees, like Mountains,
Rivers, Towers, Wastelands and Deserts are the Landscape of our Storied World.

Story is Alchemy and Trees are the great alchemists, in the words of author Colin
Tudge:

Trees at least are compounded from earth, water and air and the sun that powers the
whole enterprise is the greatest fire of all (2005: 254)

Tudge elaborates further on humanities gratitude to trees when he remarks that:

Our brains and our dexterity evolved together: they are an exercise in co-evolution.
But the only reason we have such dextrous hands and whirling arma is that our
ancestors spent 80 million years or so in the trees (2005: 5)

Moving further along the roots of this Tale Tellers Tree I came to those who explored
the Nature of Story through the Indigenous Worldview. Now there are many scholars
who seek an understanding of the story of the earth through the indigenous
perspective. Robin and Tonia Riddington provide a phenomenonological approach to
this worldview with:

Mythical cosmologies are not the attempts of savages to explain in fantasy where
empirical knowledge of reality is absent, but are rather the opposite - statements in
allegorical form about knowledge of the interrelations between what we would call
natural (objective), psychic (psychological), and cultural (learned adaptational)
aspects of reality. (1970: 49)
Others speak about specific stories such as that of the First Nations of the Americas:

In spite of their power, achieved through violence,

Europeans lacked the sense of responsibility to the
Earth that had been a part of Native American
cultures. Native Americans were our first true
environmentalists. (Saier & Trevors 2008:1)

Wertz (2005) and Bonilla (2006) speak respectively of the North and South American
Indigenous perspective in the story of culture and connectedness to the land. While
the Indigenous Maori with their elaborate rituals in relation to their story and its place
in the cosmos are explored by such scholars as Panelli and Tipa; and Rohana
Ulluwishewa Roskruge Harmsworth and Antaran.

This Indigenous Environmental Connectedness draws deep roots into the soil of my
research. Indigenous Storytellers are known in the West for their elaborate ritual and
storytelling techniques. Australia’s Indigenous storytellers have marked my life from
a vey early age with their simply told tales with such profound messages in relation to
connectedness to people, spirit and land. It is this triangle of connectedness that
guided me towards a knowledge of story that although coming from people, draws its
strength from the land and the spirit within it. This spirituality of the land is explored
as a shamanic approach by such scholars as Aikenhead and Ogawa (2007), Boyd
(1996), Bhanu (2007); Rist and Dahdouh-Guebas (2006). Each of these scholars
explores a similar notion of the shamanic mythopoeic approach to cosmology which
is balanced with the western empirical scientific logical view. Their shamanic
approach gives credence to the totemic symbolic search for meaning that is found
within a people that still have a relationship to the story of the earth.

This connectedness through story to the earth leads up the tree to the notion of
identity with its roots in place and space. By making sense of the world around us and
our place within it we can become characters within the sustained story of humans
being. Singh and Khan speak of mythical space when they state that:

All societies, it may be argued, conceptualize space.

They have their own world views or cosmologies. Some
cultures have drawn simple, while others have constituted
complex schemata, assigning different values to their various
components. (1999: 269)

Again this term of cosmology or worldview is repeated as a link to the story approach
to relationship to existence. For one to know where they are in physical geographical
space is not enough. A person is within a cultural, religious, social and mental space
at the same time as being in the place they call home. Yet home, as place, has its own
story. My home is the Earth, yet it could also be the Southern Hemisphere, the South
Pacific, Australia, NSW, Byron Bay or a place beneath a gum tree. Place is explored
Cronon who makes the point of turning the story back onto humanity and seeks them
to ask the following questions in their relationship to the world they inhabit:
(1992: 1376) .

These answers cannot be quantitatively answered in an empirical way. These

questions are about lived experience, of connectedness and identity. Life is a
Phenomenon explored via Narrative through the Phenomenon of Story.

Moving now up into the branches of the tree we come to the place where the branches
move in different directions. On the right hand side the bough of Logic with its
connected branches of Ecology, including Social Ecology and Deep Ecology; The
Gaia Hypothesis of Lovelock and Margulis (1974); and the evolving field of Eco
Composition. Balancing this is the bough of Myth with its branches of Mystery and
the Mstic; The Earth Mother and the feminine goddess approach to the story of
Nature; and the myriad stories of Earth Spirituality ranging from ancient druidic
practice to the latest new age practices. Whereas the right bough is populated by
academics and popular authors the left bough is populated by the people of the earth
who relate to the Earth on a quasi-religious current that has roots in both the primeval
myth and the indigenous worldview. They also share many facets with the opposite
bough with reverence for nature and a deeper consciousness of their lived
environment, yet to the Mystic, the Living World is a deity that is the creator of the
greatest story in existence – Earth

Instead of transcendence, the Goddess represents immanence, which they visualize as

the flow of energy that connects all things. Through religious ritual and magic, and
women in the Goddess movement attempt to link what they believe is the divine
within them to the divine around them in the natural world. To them, the Goddess is
the mystical experience within of everything that exists without (Griffin 1995: 40)

Researchers such as Matles (1991); Bloch (1998); Patil (1974); and Swain (1991), are
interwoven with their subject in their research of the story of the spirituality of the
earth. There is an overwhelming surrender to, what Romantic Poet John Keats called,
the Truth and Beauty of Life. Although this worldview may be stated as being
Alternative or New Age there is a substance in the connectedness which is almost
Buddhist in its premise that there is no separation between the story of the divine and
the story of life. The Narrative of the Phenomenon is Right Here, Right Now, Living,
Breathing, Encompassing the very nature of being.

Moving to the less Mystical side of the story, through the academic approaches of The
Conscious Organism of the Earth in the Gaia Hypothesis and the Web of Life
Theories of Deep and Social Ecology, we come to the Logical attempt to correct
humanities (or Western Humanities) disconnectedness with Nature.

ecocomposition addresses the current environmental crisis as a potentially

catastrophic biospheric event that demands our consideration and action, identifying
 the ecological relationships between humans and surrounding environments as
dependent and symbiotic. It recognizes the decline of nature both discursively and
materially (Dobrin & Weisser 2002: 574)

This decline in the discourse of Nature seems at present to be shifting somewhat with
the talk of Climate Change, yet there is still a gulf. A fair portion of humanity is still
‘lost in the wilderness’, without realizing that they are in the wilderness at all. As the
old agage goes – ‘they can’t see the wood for the trees’. Even the neural receptors and
dendrites of our brains are set up like roots and interconnected branches, yet there is a
separation between Our Story and The Story of the Earth. The two cannot exist apart.
Firstly, it is because the chaotic human story could see the devastation of the earthly
story. Secondly, and this links to the aims of this Literature Review, Story is as much
a part of our conscious living earthly experience of being as breakfast and breathing.
The Earth is not a Garden. That idea is shaped by our story overlaying the story of the
earth. The Earth is a Wilderness. To complete the circle of the story and to come back
to the roots of etymology, Wilderness is drawn from the Proto Indo European ghwelt
+ dheusum + ness. Ness is of course the suffix of action or state of, while dheusum
(from where we also find deer) means that which breathes (alive!) and finally ghwelt
– That which we call the Wild…. means - untamed. So to tell its story, wilderness is
that which is in the State of Being Untamed and Alive.

The Nature of Story is the Wilderness of Story. Story is Untamed and Alive. It is a
Tree, A Mountain, A River, A Tower, A Wasteland, A Desert, and it is The Wind that
keeps on blowing…….
 WORKS CITED

Aikenhead G & Ogawa M. 2007. Indigenous knowledge and science revisited. Cult
Stud of Sci Educ (2007) 2:539–620 DOI 10.1007/s11422-007-9067-8

Bhanu S 2008.The Shaman and the ISness of TO BE

Children’s Literature in Education (2008) 39:21–30
DOI 10.1007/s10583-007-9056-2

Bonilla H. 2006 . Relevance to Political Struggle and Development. Mountain

Research and Development Vol 26 No 4 November 2006: 336–342

Boyd C.E. 1996 Shamanic Journeys into the Otherworld of the Archaic Chichimec
Source: Latin American Antiquity, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Jun., 1996), pp. 152-164 Published
by: Society for American Archaeology Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/971615

Cronon W. A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative The Journal of
American History, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Mar., 1992), pp. 1347-1376 Published by:
Organization of American Historians Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2079346

De Santillana G, von Dechend H. 1977 Hamlet's mill: an essay on myth and the
frame of time Edition2, reissue, illustrated David R. Godine Publisher

Dobrin I and Weisser R 2002 Breaking Ground in Ecocomposition: Exploring

Relationships between Discourse and Environment College English, Vol. 64, No. 5
(May, 2002), pp. 566-589 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3250754

Eisenberg E. 2001. Mountains of the Gods. Proceedings: Alexander von Humboldt’s

Natural History Legacy and Its Relevance for Today
2001 Northeastern Naturalist Special Issue 1:109-120

Harper D. The Online Etymological Dictionary, 2001

McDonald J 2002. Botanical Determination of The Middle East Tree of Life.

Economic Botany 56(2):113-129. 2002
Matles D 1991. Nature, the Modern and the Mystic: Tales from Early Twentieth
Century Geography. Source: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers,
New Series, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1991), pp. 272-286 Published by: Blackwell Publishing
on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British
Geographers) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/622948

James E.O. 1968. The Tree of Life Source: Folklore, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Winter, 1968),
pp. 241-249 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises,
Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1259355

Patil S. 1974 Earth Mother Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 2, No. 9 (Apr., 1974), pp.
31-58 Published by: Social Scientist Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3516111

Panelli R. & Tipa G 2007. Placing Well-Being: A Maori Case Study of Cultural
and Environmental Specificity. EcoHealth 4, 445–460, 2007 DOI: 10.1007/s10393-
007-0133-1

Ridington R and Ridington T. 1970 The Inner Eye of Shamanism and Totemism
Source: History of Religions, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Aug., 1970), pp. 49-61 Published by:
The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1061822

Rist S Dahdouh-Guebas F. 2006. Ethnosciences––A step towards the integration

of scientific and indigenous forms of knowledge
in the management of natural resources for the future. Environ Dev Sustain (2006)
8:467–493 DOI 10.1007/s10668-006-9050-7

Saier M.H. & Jr. Trevors J.T. 2008 First Nations/Indigenous People's Wisdom,
Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008

Singh J P. Khan M. 1999. Saptadv¯ıp¯a Vasumat¯ı: the mythical geography of the

Hindus. GeoJournal 48: 269–278, 1999. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Printed in the Netherlands.

Swain T. 1991. The Earth Mother from Northern Waters Source: History of
Religions, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Feb., 1991), pp. 223-260 Published by: The University of
Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1062956

Tudge C. (2006). The Secret Life of Trees: How They Live and Why They Matter
(Penguin Press Science S.). Penguin Books Ltd.

Ulluwishewa, Roskruge ,Harmsworth ,Antaran. 2008. Indigenous knowledge for

natural resource management:a comparative study of Ma¯ori in New Zealand and
Dusun in Brunei Darussala. GeoJournal (2008) 73:271–284
DOI 10.1007/s10708-008-9198-9

Wertz S.K. 2004 Maize. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics (2005)
18:131–156 _ Springer DOI 10.1007/s10806-005-0635-1
TALE TELLERS TREE
MODERN STORY

WILDERNESS ENVIRONMENT

ACTIVIST BEAUTY RESOURCE CONSERVATION

MYTH LOGIC

EARTH MOTHER EARTH GAIA HYPOTHESIS ECO COMPOSITION

SPIRITUALITY

MYSTERY ECOLOGY

CONNECTEDNESS IDENTITY

SPACE INDIGENOUS PRIMEVAL STORY LIVING EARTH PLACE

WORLDVIEW - TREE OF LIFE