Creating the Webbd Wheel: What Do the Stories Mean?
In which we consider meaning and truth ...
Storytellers are often asked what a story means. Another frequent question: “Is it true?”
A good oral story holds layers of meaning and truth, and different listeners will make meaning in different ways. As a teller I learn new ways of thinking about stories I’ve told for years from my audience. Stories are much like dance. I can’t teach you your dance. I can dance mine beside you, but yours is uniquely yours. I don’t know what any given story means to you. I can only say what it means to me, and that meaning changes from telling to telling because I’m always changing and growing, both as a teller and as a person.
One way we can interpret stories is to consider every character as a piece of one psyche. Not all stories lend themselves well to this view, but The Erlkonig, written in the 18th century by Goethe and retold in post #16, does.
This tale was originally a ballad, and in all the versions I’ve heard and read, the characters stay the same. There is a father and his son, a horse, and the Erlkonig himself. If we consider the story as an interplay between pieces of a single self, we have an innocent, intuitive child who sees clearly and speaks the truth. We have an adult whose innocence and intuition have been destroyed by the overculture. He’s been tamed, civilized, and rendered powerless. He is not at one with his feelings. He’s firmly entrenched in denial. His culture has taught him what it means to be a man, and he’s raising his son accordingly.
The Erlkonig came for him long ago, promising everything would be “easy and forgetful,” and no one saved him.
The horse represents our instinctive nature, the part of us that recognizes danger and responds to it immediately without logic or debate. It lies in the part of our brain that tells us to fight, flee, fawn, or freeze. The Erlkonig is the Dark Man, the shadow, the lying, insidious voice that tempts us into self-destructive behavior and sabotages our power.
The story of The Erlkonig has survived and branched out into many forms because it speaks to the human condition in a way we’ve all experienced. We’ve all been innocent children who saw clearly and were repeatedly silenced and invalidated by the overculture. Many of us have been parents who teach our children, with the best intentions in the world, the same damaging things we were taught. We all have an instinctual nature; our feelings and intuition give us information we ignore or deny at our peril. And we all must contend with the seduction of addictive behavior, consumer culture, and the festering of unhealed feelings and wounds.
In some versions of this tale, the child is clearly dead when he arrives home. In others, it’s not so clear. What we do know is the child has been injured, diminished or extinguished. The Erlkonig came for him, and he was not saved, though the horse tried. The man, however, having been a victim himself, lacked the power to do anything but deny and minimize the child’s experience, even to the point of telling the child’s mother he fell asleep because “the forest was so quiet and dark.”
What does the story mean?
What does it mean to you?
Is this story true?
What does true mean to you? Does it feel true? Have you been the child? The man? The horse? The Erlkonig?
Now the story is yours. Pass it on.
(This essay was published with post #16 of The Hanged Man.)