How the Body Tells Stories

I wanted to take a moment today to talk about how the body tells stories. Now, this is big, and one that we can talk about in a variety of ways, including the way we tell the stories of ourselves with our bodies, to the way that bodies perform narratives. Today, I’m focusing on the general idea of bodies telling stories, and the way that happens. The more specific stories that bodies tell we’ll reserve for another time.

When we think about stories, we immediately think of the written stories first. We think of books, or blogs, or scripts of movies. We don’t think about the more inherent narratives, the stories that we tell in more intricate, performative ways. But mythology, and storytelling more generally, involves many kinds of narratives, and stories that can be akin to written narratives. It can involve oral narratives, bodily performed narratives, and narratives about narratives.

I’ve talked before on this blog about implicit mythology, but I have previously used it to understand the ways that playing video games can be a type of storytelling. But implicit mythology also helps us to understand other forms of narratives. Jonathan Miles-Watson, for example, used implicit mythology to understand that which both inspires and develops personal narratives of experience. The narratives around us become bodily understood and interpreted.

It is through our bodies that we see the world, and through which we are seen by the world. Seeing me is also seeing my body. Anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote about how we all have two bodies: a physical body and a social body. The social body in many ways controls the way our physical bodies are read and understood by the people around us. Our physical experiences and understanding of our physical body is always ‘clothed’ by our social categories and social worlds. In many ways, there is no such thing as a nude body, because we are always clothed in these thoughts and considerations. Douglas’s two bodies are always in interaction and communication with each other, constantly reinforcing the categories of one on to the other. Essentially, our bodies are more than the biological mechanisms they are. They are also social tools for communication and categorisation.

The body, therefore, is the primary model through which we tell stories because it’s the primary form through which we exist. As I sit at my computer, writing this blog post, it is still through my body that I write this. My hands move, my back aches in my chair, but also I feel the rush of my heart when I know exactly how I want to phrase the bit I want. Our bodies are the way we experience our narratives, because we are our bodies.

There is a subset of folklore studies that focuses on other forms of storytelling than traditional words. Bodylore, as its called, refers to the way that the body has its own text, and is the central local in which culture and tradition is received, understood, and transmitted. We do very little without our bodies, including the way we tell and understand stories.

Bodylore highlights some of what we’ve already talked about: how the body is central to communication and identity, and is the central form in which we engage with and interact with the social worlds around us. What bodylore centrally understands is that the body is inherently preformative, and is the way in which we transmit and communicate our identity to other people around us, through these performances.

If it is through our bodies that we taken in narratives, that we relate to narratives, then the body can be a central piece in the transmission of narratives. It can be the tool that we use to tell stories, to communicate ourselves and our stories and the stories that we love.