Stories are profound as they provide a room for us to exist through reconfiguring memories. In this sense, memory is not simply the mechanism of storing and recalling certain knowledge and experiences but it is a social and political process that comes to being within interpersonal relationships and takes shape through stories. The anthropologist Michael Jackson’s book The Politics of Storytelling (2002) especially explores the intersubjective fabrics of memory and storytelling through both his engagement with Hannah Arendts’ works and his encounters in the field. The core of his argument is how an existential imperative underlies movements and strategies of storytelling—as stories become a space for exerting control and agency over our own lives, social structures, and moral worlds. This is apparent and clearer when he writes “In spite of being aware that eternity is infinite and human life finite, that the cosmos is great and the human world small, and that nothing anyone says or does can immunise him or her from the contingencies of history, the tyranny of circumstance, the finality of death, and the accidents of fate, every human being needs some modicum of choice, craves some degree of understanding, demands some say, and expects some sense of control over the course of his or her own life” (p.14).
And so, Jackson brings two perspectives together in his work. The first concerns Hannah Arendts’ argument that “storytelling is a strategy transforming private into public meanings” (p.13-14)—specifically the political relationship between private and public realms. And the second is existential as Jackson presents storytelling as “a vital human strategy for sustaining a sense of agency in the face of disempowering circumstances” (p.15). Through narration, instead of living the narrated events in passivity, one actively reworks on them. This is a social process that is both intersubjective and intrapsychic. In other words, the narrator of the story “never remains the sole author of his or her own life story” (p.23) as stories come into being within an already existing web of human relationships. A step further of this claim would be to say that stories forge and reshape the webs of human relationships.
Storytelling does not necessarily aid us in understanding the world conceptually or cognitively but it rather changes our experiences of events that are being recalled and symbolically restructures them. And this is tied to Jackson’s main argument that sees stories as providing us with a sense of agency in the messiness of the world: “storytelling reworks and remodels subject-object relations in ways that subtly alter the balance between actor and acted upon, thus allowing us to feel that we actively participate in a world that for a moment seemed to discount, demean, and disempower us” (p.16). In a way then, stories help rework reality in order to make it bearable—making us “renew our faith that the world is within our grasp” (p.17). Then, stories become akin to a kind of theatre “where we collaborate in reinventing ourselves and authorising notions, both individual and collective, of who we are” (p.16). There are also times when storytelling becomes prompted by some crisis or a misfortune in which one’s autonomy is undermined, recognition withheld, and action made impossible. In such scenarios, storytelling could act as a “coping strategy that involves making words stand for the world, and then, by manipulating them, changing one’s experience of the world” (p.18) and relationships—providing meaning.
Given his existential approach, Jackson is still careful to note that what he is presenting is not to say that “we are the stories we tell” or that stories are somehow isomorphic with lives. “Such mimetic assumptions are as flawed as the sociological view that stories embody the form of society. The error in both cases is to focus on fixed and finite meanings, usually of a conceptual kind, and thereby overlook the action of meaning-making” (p.18). Thus, Jackson prefers to emphasize storytelling over stories—”the social process rather than the product of narrative activity” (p.18).
Image: Memory by Svetoslav Stoyanov
Thinking Prismatically 
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