Your Stories My Stories Her Stories His Stories
She's a great storyteller, they say. But what about those others? What about the countless myopic-perspectived storytellers who have stories but cannot express them? Who will consent to be their audience? Where will they divulge the stories they want to, but cannot bring themselves to? How will they finally break that ice barrier - the thing keeping their fully functioning, well-stocked, beautiful ship from leaving the harbor? And if they do leave, what will stop them from imitating that mammoth morbidity of the Titanic? Will their stories be punctured? Will their voices lose all sound, effectively sunk and suppressed with gallons of cold salt ocean water pressuring down, pushing on every side until eardrums snap? If those storytellers can no longer listen, they cannot tell any longer. So how will that barrier of ice keeping their story-ships be cracked? What final impetus will jaw ajar their salivating mouths - slack their story-telling apparatuses open? And how will they remain ungorged? Is that even possible? And if it's not, how will they recover? Can they? That great storyteller surely was holed a few times. And she's still afloat.
1 comment:
I find myself repeating conversations with entirely different people. I can't tell if it's just my mind in scratched-record mode or if some karmic force just guides me to similar conversations. Here I find myself addressing storytelling the second time in as many days.
Walter Benjamin (probably the greatest critical mind of the early 20th century) wrote an essay in the latter years of his too-short life called "The Storyteller." In my humble opinion, it is perhaps the greatest piece of literary criticism of the last hundred years. Although "The Storyteller" examines the relatively successful Russian author Nikolai Leskov, "The Storyteller" really just uses Leskov as a magnifying glass to explore the state of stories and storytelling in the modern age.
I believe Benjamin's essay contains an answer of sorts to the list of queries you end this post with.
Experience.
The German word Benjamin uses throughout "The Storyteller" (and other essays) is "Erfahrung" - its best translation into English is "experience." Benjamin could have used another more common German word for experience - "Erlebnis." But he didn't. You see, Erfahrung connotes the kind of empirical experience that is communicable whereas Erlebnis connotes the kind of inner-lived experience that cannot be communicated. Erlebnis is more identifiable with the Romantic poets and such while Erfahrung is something much more folksier... earthier... human-to-human.
All real storytellers fill their stories with Erfahrung.
Consider these last paragraphs from "The Storyteller":
"In fact, one can go on and ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman’s relationship, whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way. It is a kind of procedure which may perhaps most adequately be exemplified by the proverb if one thinks of it as an ideogram of a story. A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening like ivy around a wall."
He continues:
"Seen in this way, the storyteller joins the ranks of the teachers and sages. He has counsel—not for a few situations, as the proverb does, but for many, like the sage. For it is granted to him to reach back to a whole lifetime (a life, incidentally, that comprises not only his own experience but no little of the experience of others; what the storyteller knows from hearsay is added to his own). His gift is the ability to relate his life; his distinction, to be able to tell his entire life. The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story. This is the basis of the incomparable aura about the storyteller, in Leskov as in Hauff, in Poe as in Stevenson. The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself."
I ache every time I read that.
Your post contains (what I see is) an extension of what Benjamin wrote. You write, "If those storytellers can no longer listen, they cannot tell any longer." Storytellers' alpha-and-omega audiences must be themselves, for they glean from their own lives and observances, and they are the crafters of their stories which (if honest) are inevitable reflectections of themselves and the world as they see it and wish/fear it to be.
You, my friend, are filled with Erfahrung. Keep sharing.
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