Bhupa P. Dhamala

We have heard a lot of stories in our life - from early childhood to when we were adults. Our grandmother told us bedtime stories, which made us sleep. Our mother did the same. We are handing down the same tradition to our children and grandchildren. Likewise, we have heard countless stories from our elders in the community, teachers at schools and colleges, religious preachers, socio-political leaders, and many more. We find those stories fascinating. We are spellbound when we hear stories and enjoy them. I wonder if we have ever pondered over what is unique about the stories that attract us so much.

Power of Tale
Stories have magnetic power. They are powerful in two ways. First, they have interesting contents. They tell us about the things around us - the way we are, the way we do things, the way we live - simple things to understand. We have seen every corner of our homes, front yard, backyard, vegetable garden, flower garden, fruit trees, and the like. If we go a bit far, we can see fields with planted seeds and ripe harvests or, in some places, barren lands without plants. Sometimes we find abandoned houses in the village and forlorn estates in town. All of these experiences are quite common to us all. They happen to all people in all cultures. So when somebody tells a tale about their own experiences, we liken them to our own experiences. Since stories tell our own experiences, they are powerful.
Second, stories are powerful because tellers tell them in exciting ways. They choose specific words and combine them in unusual ways. Sometimes they create rhythm with different intonation patterns. These uncommon features of stories easily attract us. Along with the specific language, they also use gestures, signs, and other things we enjoy. Even newspaper stories that are targeted to adults have particular way of telling. They may be about simple events, but they are told in interesting ways.

Double Structure: Double Meaning
Fascinating though tales may be, we should be wary that those tales might mean more than what they mean on the surface. A world-famous linguist Noam Chomsky (1957) said every statement we make has two structures - surface structure and deep structure. To borrow his exemplary sentence "Flying planes can be dangerous" is an example of a statement with at least two structures with two meanings. One structure would be like "The act of flying planes can be dangerous", and another would be like "Planes that are flying can be dangerous." Obviously, these two deep structures can have two corresponding meanings.
Just as a linguistic structure has surface and deep structure, so a tale can also have two structures. One is the surface structure of the story, which we listen or read and understand what it means on the surface. But while so doing we might be losing the meaning of the deep structure of the story. We tend to think the told part of the story is true and perfect, ignoring the fact that the untold part of the story can also tell us much.

Common Tales
We have heard many tales about life and the universe - the ancient tales about the creation of the world and its species, the tales about the creation of humans, their cognitive abilities, and their inventions and discoveries. Thousands and millions of stories have been told about humans and their achievements. While some of them are factual, many others may are not true. They are manufactured by some ingenious humans to glorify and/or denounce their fellow beings.
Most importantly, creation stories in different cultures regard God as the Creator and the species as creations in the desire of God. In many religious scriptures noble people like Kings are hailed as incarnations of God, and the preachers are regarded as messengers of God. The storytellers present them as heroes to fight evil forces and establish truth and values. We enjoy listening to those stories and believe in what they say.

Tales Untold
But the common people are always forgotten. Few stories are told about them, or even if they are talked about, they are presented as helping hands of Kings and nobility. One sad fact about our world is that it is marked by the social hierarchy of high caste and low caste, rich class and poor class, males and females, whites and non-whites. In this unequal society, the powerless people are discriminated. They are ignored, forgotten, and pushed to the background. They are greater in number but are denigrated as as a minority. Not surprisingly, there can be multitudes of stories about them. The storytellers do not often tell about their pains, sufferings, and miseries. The people of minority groups are in fact bearing the unbearable. They are indeed tolerating the intolerable. But the story tellers do not seem to know about their experiences. Needless to say that the greater number of people who have contributed so much for the happiness of the fewer powerful have been ignored.
But the untold tales can tell us much. They can tell us what is hidden beneath the surface. The critical readers can delve into the hidden side of things and unravel what are beneath the surface. Just as grammarians find deep structures beneath the surface structures of sentences, so the the critical readers of stories can find deep structures beneath what is told on the surface stories. The critical readers demonstrate how the story tellers say what they say. They can unveil things that are veiled by surface structures. Once we see how even a story contains both surface structure and deep structure, we can begin to understand even the untold tales can tell us much.

(Dhamala is a Professor of English, TU)