Homeless: the story of a wandering Self. Inhabitable mirrors for possible reflections

Narration is a word à la mode, lately. One could bump into narration turning on his TV on any channel and in any show, from politics’ in-depth analysis to Sunday afternoon entertainment, passing through competitive cooking reality shows and breakfast TV.

Newspapers love and envy narration because journalism is seldom good at telling stories, and they take revenge on it by writing narration on any page. So, each political party has its own narration, and each fashion brand turns its advertisement into storytelling. Social networks are the sanctuaries of autobiographical reasoning, as everyone pretends that public web pages are locked up diaries, in order to tailor secrets and stories to be listened to by the world.

There is women storytelling which is different form men’s, black storytelling, gay storytelling, children storytelling, native storytelling, East and West and North and South storytelling, illness storytelling, love-story telling, addiction storytelling, addiction to storytelling and of course meta-storytelling (which is telling storytelling).

From this overwhelming diffusion of stories and storytellers, one could infer that after all Lyotard was wrong, when he declared the end of the Grand Narratives, but in fact he wasn’t: current narratives are small, superficial, simplified, easily consumable and forgettable.

This is why I reckon that it is not trivial or redundant trying to recall a deepest meaning of narration, a meaning that is tightly tied to identity and subjectification. Narration is an instinctive human process, a cognitive mechanism: a way of turning bare life into experience, a way of self-reflection through interaction.

At this level, telling a story means weaving together oneself, the others, one’s past, present and future, places, memory and imagination. In this sense, people tell stories of themselves to the others not just in order to have an audience or to be listened to, but rather to recognize themselves in the others’ eyes, to find a home in the others’ ears and mind.

So, in this chapter I will try to “set the plot” of storytelling and of the role it plays in human experience, focusing in particular on the wandering mind’s narration, in a double sense: culturally shared stories on homelessness and homeless people’s possible ways of autobiographical reasoning.