Fairy tales, Cultural Narrative, and Quebec’s Secession from Canada

 

"Reality is one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes." ~Vladimir Nabokov

This post is about the power of a good story.

I love fairy tales because I think they say something very important about our human collective unconscious and about the power of a good story.  I have been reading a book of Algerian fairy tales (they’re good – they haven’t been rewritten to be PC yet) and I was struck by one particular manoeuvre in the text that repeated itself in several stories.

The hero of the story is often first introduced to us as a child chased away from home or prince/ princess faced with sudden inexplicable hardship for several years.  The turning point in the narrative comes at some point after these long years of suffering.  At this point, the hero often tells his or her own story.  The recipient of the tale is a new person in the hero’s life.  This person is willing to listen and sees through their rags to the royalty underneath. 

The hero’s recounting of their story, their past and their hardships, marks a turning point in the tale.

I feel like having the hero tell their own story is an ancient storytelling manoeuvre, something that can be seen in the Ilyad and the Odessey.  In the Illyad, there is another remarkable twist, in that the hero makes up his own story.  Odysseus is a clever man, and not one to be hampered by objective reality.  His tales are not necessarily true to the facts of the events; but perhaps they are true to the feelings of the events.  The modern notion of history as a factual and objective narrative of events didn’t exist 10,000 years ago.  And why should it have?  Is it more important – more real or true - to know that X event took place on Y date or to know that it felt like battling a Cyclops?

… But back to the fairy tales. 

It is interesting to note that in this particular collection of fairy tales, there are other characters who undergo years of suffering and never get to tell their stories.  These unfortunate people either get forgotten in the narrative or meet a sad end.  It feels like being able to tell their story to someone who cares saves these heroes.

There is a form of psychotherapy called Narrative Therapy.  In Narrative Therapy, the client tells their story, and then learns to re-tell it.  So if the story has always been depressing, they learn to add elements of light, and they learn to write new chapters that follow a different plot-line.  (Note that the changes to the story really only has to happen on the level of the story. The objective reality might not change.)

I think this approach to psychotherapy is fascinating because it is so simple and so profound.  (I mean come on.  It’s used in fairy tales!!)  After all, don’t we all want to be able to tell the story of who we are and how we got that way to someone who really cares? 

And yet, who’s story do we really know?  Like, really? 

I don’t even really know the story of a couple of my close friends!  (...I hope I’m not a bad friend.)  Of course I know pieces of the stories.  When you know someone over a number of years, if for no other reason you know part of the story because you were in it.  (Still doesn’t mean you know how they would tell their story though.)  But I think it is surprising to think that with a lot of the people we are supposedly closest to, we might not know the stories of (e.g., our parents, our siblings).  Do we know what their full story is as they would tell it?  Do they know ours?  Or is it even worse:  are you close to someone you wish would just stop telling the same old horrible stories?

The idea of having somebody who can hear your story is not terribly different from the notion of having validating relationships (discussed previously).  But it brings another element into the discussion:  culture.

Whatever part of the story you share with a group is your ‘culture’.  Members of that group can’t help but reflect those elements of your story back at you and validate them.  All cultures have their self-narratives.  How deeply you are assimilated to a culture might even be described as how much of the group’s story you consider your own.  And how powerful these stories are! 

Think about a relatively low-octane conflict: language and secession in Canada. 

I got into an argument the other day with a fellow Canadian over Quebec’s position in Canada.  He is from the English part of Canada, I am from the French one.  We are both reasonable people (or at least I am) and – this is important – we both basically agree!  He does not want Quebec to separate from Canada, and I do not want Quebec to separate from Canada.  You’d think we’d be pretty much on the same page.  But you would be wrong.  We get antagonistic emotional reactions to talking about the issue and usually end up arguing and not listening to each others' points of view.  (But at least we try.  I mean seriously, if two people who basically agree on a lower-octane conflict can’t have a civilized conversation, then we really have to give up on peace in some of the stickier conflicts in the world.  And we just can’t afford to do that.)

But back to our argument.  Though I personally do not want secession, I understand why many people do.  Quebec’s culture is distinct from that of the rest of Canada in many ways, and French-Canadian history (or self-narrative) involves a lot of ill-treatment at the hands of the British and English-Canadians.  When I tried to explain this to my friend, he was somewhat surprised.  His narrative of English-Canadians is that they are nice and polite and peaceful and would not mistreat another group.  When I insisted this maltreatment was factual history, he protested that it happened a long time ago and we should all just move on (that may not have been how he said it, but that’s how I heard it).  Note that once again, I basically agree with him.  But we had conflicting cultural narratives that neither of us were sufficiently validating in order to placate the other, and therein lay the problem.  (This is not easy stuff!)

I told my friend to find out more about Quebec’s history from a Francophone perspective.  He replied that it would show a different version of events than the Anglophone one. I said “duh, that’s the point”.  But I meant to say something eloquent and persuasive, along the lines of: “Indeed, it may.  But I know you will enjoy to get to know your cultural neighbours and fellow founders of our great country!  Learn their story as they tell it.” (Yeah, I know.  Apparently I should leave diplomacy to my sister.)

The point is this: how one culture sees themselves may not be how another culture sees them.  How one culture remembers history is not necessarily how another culture remembers the actual events in history.  And how the story morphs over the generations is hard to keep track of.  And yet – despite the fact that we know this about history, our stories are some of the things we hold onto the most strongly.  Even when we know they might be factually wrong or that we can’t prove them.  We need our stories.  After all, it really just isn’t important to know exactly what happened.  It felt like battling a Cyclops.

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Thanks to @miriam_leia for some edits and tips :)

Good, Evil, and Etymology in Health Research

I have been reading some books on religion that have me fascinated.  God is Not One and Religious Illiteracy, by Stephen Prothero.  I have always found the topic of religion interesting and important, especially as regards health.  Indeed, it seems to me like many religious rules resemble guidelines for healthful living that we have ‘discovered’ though research.  For example, many religions emphasize both psychical and physical purity; modern medicine emphasizes hygiene.  Some emphasize certain moral or ethical aspects, like being nice to others; we in behavioral research are continually floored over how much good social support does.  The principle of being generally satisfied with what you have seems to come up a lot in religion; and we keep telling people to reduce the stress in their lives.

You might argue that this is just a matter of interpretation, and maybe it is, but consider the following. 

Let’s look at some etymology. (Thanks to Online Etymology Dictionary.)

Evil (adj.) 

O.E. yfel (Kentish evel) "bad, vicious, ill, wicked," from P.Gmc. *ubilaz (cf. O.Saxon ubil, O.Fris., M.Du. evel, Du. euvel, O.H.G. ubil, Ger. übel, Goth. ubils), from PIE *upelo-, from base *wap- (cf. Hittite huwapp- "evil"). The noun is O.E. yfel. "In OE., as in all the other early Teut. langs., exc. Scandinavian, this word is the most comprehensive adjectival expression of disapproval, dislike or disparagement" [OED]. Evil was the word the Anglo-Saxons used where we would use bad, cruel, unskillful, defective (adj.), or harm, crime, misfortune, disease. The meaning "extreme moral wickedness" was in O.E., but did not become the main sense until 18c.

Isn’t this interesting?

One of the things I like about what I study is that it has such a spiritual dimension.  The words for good and evil or health and illness, show that.  In French, the word for evil is ‘mal’ and the word for illness is ‘maladie’.  As the link above shows, in English the words illness, ill, and evil are all related.

Now what if we look up the etymology of the word health?

Health

O.E. hælþ "wholeness, a being whole, sound or well," from P.Gmc. *hailitho, from PIE *kailo- "whole, uninjured, of good omen" (cf. O.E. hal "hale, whole;" O.N. heill "healthy;" O.E. halig, O.N. helge "holy, sacred;" O.E. hælan "to heal"). Of physical health in M.E., but also "prosperity, happiness, welfare; preservation, safety."

So there’s a suggestion that health = holy.  In French the connection exists too.  Health, or ‘santé’ is related to the word ‘sain’, which means holy .

But the importance of spirituality in life tends to be ignored in modern science and research.  In general, I don’t think this is a bad thing.  After all, we don’t all agree on the sticky topic that is spirituality and religion, so if we can stay with the ‘facts’ that we CAN all agree on (or mostly all agree on) then we can have meaningful dialogue and progress.  And I like dialogue and progress.  (Seriously.  Just in case you were worried, I don't mean to proselytize.  Except that I believe people should be able to think/ believe whatever they want, so I can do the same.)

But the importance of the spiritual in health can’t be ignored.  Lifestyles, so often informed if not governed by culture and religion, are the basis of a lot of healthful and unhealthy practices.  The presence or absence of a community we can rely on makes a huge difference both in terms of the development and progression of mental and physical health disorders.  When we talk about behavioral health, we are talking about what people do to stay healthy.  And why.  That is, what are the motivations to good health? 

What if by overlooking spirituality and religion in health research and its important effects on motivation and behaviors in health research we are in some ways missing the point?

But then if that's true then how do we develop the language to talk about these things in a health setting?  How can a therapist talk to a client of a different faith (or of no faith) about spirituality in a way that doesn’t make somebody feel left out or misunderstood or pressured?  How can a researcher study spirituality in a country of population that doesn't have a homogeneous set of beliefs or that doesn't want to talk about them? 

It may be too big a challenge.  But it is worth thinking about.