One of my friends', Miranda's, favorite greetings after she hasn't seen a friend in a long time is to say: "Tell me a story." She recognizes by now, after two years of our friendship, that I am infamous for not having a clear, coherent story to tell her when she asks. Whenever I try to tell her a story, I look back on my life's history, both recent and past, and try to think of events in my life that would make a good story. I am always at a loss as to where to begin.
Today I finished reading Tim O'Brien's book, "The Things They Carried." Beyond being a book about the Vietnam war, this book is about memory and storytelling. O'Brien questions whether the "happening-truth" of a story - the actual facts of occurance - are more relevant or important than the "story-truth." He presents the idea that it is acceptable, and sometimes even desireable, to change the details of a story to better bring to light to the reader the feelings that should be experienced. The goal of a story should be to make the flame of truth burn brighter for the reader/listener; to share a dream/memory that the story-teller is having. If this is best accomplished by changing a few details, than that is what should be done.
This approach to storytelling makes me consider the attitude our society takes toward reporting events and knowledge. We seem to have taken an oath in empiricism. Nothing is true, and therefore, nothing is meaningful, unless it can be measured and consequently proven. What could the benefit be to adopting O'Brien's view of storytelling. Sure, we may not want news-anchors fabricating statistics and factual events in order to make us feel what it was like at the scene of a warzone, but can we in today's society create legends of men and women who live masterful, role-model lives without injecting their stories with cynicism and mudslinging?
"What stories can do, I guess, is make things present" (180). In a phenomenological sense (and I in no way claim to know nearly enough about phenomenology) stories call into presence aspects of experiences and relations that are absent for the listener/reader. The listener was not at the setting for the story, was not in the middle of the action, and cannot know what it was like to feel the events unfolding around him/her. Adapting the telling of the story can make him/her understand what it was like to be there.
I believe that story-telling is intricately linked to the human mind's ability to encorporate and learn from the past. O'Brien describes how in his stories he can make the dead sit up and talk again. By dreaming, he can keep his friends alive forever. Through story-telling, we can re-live, re-learn, and re=love our past. What greater pedagogical tool can we have to transmit life-learnings than to use our gift of storytelling - complete with our understanding of symbols, story structure, and morals - to craft experiences for those we care about?
I make no claim to be even an adequate story teller. There are some people who are able to capture an entire room's attention through their description of the most mundane occurance, and there are those whose awkward telling of even the most startling experiences leaves the uncomfortableaudience anxious to move on in the conversation. Story-telling, I believe, is a skill that must be learned, reflected on, and practiced. I might not always have a story for Miranda, but the more I listen to the stories that she and our mutual friends tell, the deeper appreciation I gather for the stories that my life can present. I just hope that I can honor them through my telling.
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One of my favorite characters of this book has always been Rat Kiley because the very way in which he tells stories- overblown, exaggerated, nearly impossible to swallow- forces his companions and readers to search for the truth of his words, and because the embellishments he includes are only a reflection of the emotions he experiences, which he ironically includes in an attempt to make his narrative even more true.
ReplyDeleteWhat O'Brien seems to propose with Kiley is that story-telling is nothing more than a reflection of what one single person feels and experiences. Being able to tell a story, as well as being able to truly listen to one, requires a certain combination of both sight and imagination that many people (for some reason or another) lack. It's why news and the masses value the definite and the empirical: anyone with eyes can count the number of dead bodies in a picture from some distant jungle and agree that it comes to some concrete figure. To do so is easy. Much easier than opening them and allowing yourself to realize the horror, the grip of humidity like a vice around their lungs, the despair of the constant rain. We're not cynical as a society toward the power of storytelling- we are lazy, because we do not want to imagine; we are terrified, because we know where it could take us.
I'm not saying if you want to become a better story-teller, you should exaggerate (though you know sometimes I can't help it). What you do need to do is pay attention, to EVERYTHING. Not just what you see, but how you feel and why. Reflecting on the last two not only makes the first more meaningful, but allows others to share in personal truths that might otherwise lack in any other sort of definitive facts.
Telling the truth is always good; lying is not. Making up a story need not be the same as fabricating a falsehood. Good stories reveal truth; stories that conceal what is known to be true are not good. It makes sense to write imaginatively in creating a story; it is nonsense to use one's imagination for deceptive purposes. The wise storyteller embraces what is true; the fool fears it.
ReplyDeleteStories may reveal the effort of one's struggle with discovering what is true - this is part of being human. We must learn to speak the truth in love. Let our words work with, not against, the truth.
I'm going to preface this with the fact that I just got out of an art history class were we're going to be covering art from around the 1870's until the 1970's impressionism and everything like that. How photography changed art.
ReplyDeleteFine Art does the same thing when confronted with the competition of the photograph as art. Photographs can show you something exactly how it was, in almost a cold news reporting manner, and when this was able to be done some artists adapted into making their paintings show you how they felt.
This is the main difference that you're talking about between "News" and "Stories," and I am terribly excited about the prospects and individualities of the two different ways of communicating. I feel and hope that much like in art, "News" and "Stories" can influence and play off each other. Further refining and honing our abilities in both as a society at whole.
Story telling is, at its heart, a personal reaction. We tell the stories that have the most impact for us. Truly good stories not only communicate truth, but tell of something greater than the facts of an occurance. It reveals the truth of the storyteller; it builds a moment for the careful listener to swim in; it tells the narrative of a culture. If story telling were a science, it could be reduced to numbers, but my friends, storytelling is an art. It takes an eye to all elements involved to tell a true story. The truth does not have to come in the words, that is too shallow a goal for storytelling. The truth has to come in the experience. And as it is with all arts, it takes a careful listener/observer to plunge into the work.
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