THE ART OF STORYTELLING: EXPRESSIONS OF A CULTURE

Good storytellers are observant, intuitive, sensitive, and concise; they have a distinctive voice and point of view. They are good listeners and interactive conversationalists, and elicit a natural, unpremeditated response from their audience. Whether they be writers, singers, dancers, or visual artists, they have engaged our attention and interest for centuries. Storytelling as a visual art form began with the Lascaux and Chavaux cave paintings in France, continuing to modern day visual artists like the Hmong tribe women and their story cloths, and American outsider artists like Bill Traylor, Mose Toliver, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Howard Finster, Sister Mary Proctor, Wesley Snipes and others who tell their stories through paint, textiles, and text. The oral tradition began with the recitation of The Iliad and The Tale of Gilgamesh and the Greek slave, Aesop, and his fables, to the medieval troubadours and trouvères* in southern and northern France, the West African griots, the Hawaiian mo’olelo, the Irish seanchaí, the Choctaw history keepers, to the more contemporary musical chroniclers of the American scene like Harry Chapin, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and The Band, who weave their tales of war and love in patterns like an intricate Persian carpet.

Let me add a few more paragraphs as a storytelling sidebar before tackling two books I’ve selected as good examples of the storytelling mode, and let me introduce three people I have known for 40 plus years who, in their different ways, are storytellers.

We in the Pacific Northwest are used to amusing ourselves with books, music, lectures, art events, and movies during our rainy winters, barring worldwide pandemics.  Some diehard Seattleites manage to walk or run around Green Lake every day regardless of the weather, and many teenagers have at least once, in protest and with bravado, worn only shorts instead of long pants for the entire year. The sporty crowd just moves to higher elevations to ski, snowboard, and — gasp — snow camp.  My favorite, and only, snow camping story was told to me by my friend and former neighbor who once described his eventful, and only, snow camping experience of many years ago.  He, two friends, and a dog hiked into Evans Lake north of Suquamish in the coastal mountain range of British Columbia. The entire trek was uphill on a fairly narrow trail. The snow was probably three or four feet deep, they were carrying heavy packs, and the snow was not tamped down.  He said, “if you were breaking trail, your snow shoes would sink 12 – 18 inches.  If you were number three in line, you sank probably no more than 12 inches, but you had the disadvantage of the dog constantly trying to walk on top of the back of your snowshoes.”  Darkness fell at 4:15 pm, and they needed to set up camp. The snow was five to six feet deep in the area where they camped but three to four times as high where drifts had accumulated. Even with snow shoes they would sink into the snow by several feet. After collecting some wood with a great deal of difficulty, they built a fire.  As the fire blazed, they watched in horror as the fire sank further and further into the snow until it was several feet below the surface, disappearing from view, and, more importantly, providing no heat.  The temperature that night was in the single digits, and they all took turns cuddling with the dog.  After nearly freezing to death in their small tent, they celebrated their survival the next day by taking off their backpacks and jumping off some of the smaller cliffs into the snow drifts with their snowshoes on.  “It was a unique feeling,” he said.  “Although the cliffs were 15 or more feet high, the drifts made it feel like your fall was being cushioned by a mound of marshmallows.”  They made it out alive, and now have a humorous near-death Northwest adventure saga to recount years later.  This snow camping friend is a well known labor lawyer whose dry, quick wit is tinged with good humor and well-delivered punchlines. This I know because for 45 years he has told many an embarrassing story about me to his continuing (and I believe childish) delight.  We lived across the street from each other when we were all married the first time around, and our young children grew up to be close friends.  His wife, also a respected lawyer, is no slouch herself around the storytelling campfire. 

My opera singer friend and I first met in Bonn when I was 22.  He and his wife were living in Cologne where he sang bass roles for the Cologne Opera, after stints at New York City Opera, Hamburg, Munich, Vienna, Paris, Rome, Basel, Naples, and San Francisco opera companies.  He is a master of accents and has a deep well of knowledge about opera history, world history, politics, and local history.  His Pavarotti impressions and stories about other famous singers are truly hilarious and are the stuff of legend.  Upon his retirement from the University of Illinois where he was the Chairman of the Voice Department, he and his wife, now deceased, came back to Seattle, their hometown, and we have enjoyed many years of friendship and storytelling since.

My optometrist for 40 years, now, sadly, recently retired, was an inveterate joke teller.  He had jokes for every topic, and was particularly keen on political jokes.  When he discovered that we shared the same birthday and were of the same political persuasion, he would pepper me with jokes about Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump during my yearly checkups.  He had an uncanny memory for hundreds, if not thousands, of jokes which he rattled off with a quick, sly delivery and the inevitable, devastating punchline, all the while dilating my eyes or looking at charts.

We should all know someone who can tell an interesting story or tell jokes with aplomb. If we don’t, and as a good substitute, we can read stories about interesting relationships. Reading is one of many pleasures in life’s rotating carnival ride of delights. Good writers tell interesting stories to convey and illustrate their point. Relationships are stories, but there are always different ways to interpret those stories. Two books by Sally Rooney and Edward St. Aubyn are a good example of a particular storytelling style, each with a different point of view. One is layered with ambiguity; the other is as clear as glass. They are worlds apart in every aspect of culture, class, intention, writing style and topic, but they tell intriguing tales of morality, cruelty, submission, and kindness. If you’ll excuse a lapse into German phraseology, Rooney captures the weltanschauung of the current era and St. Aubyn captures the zeitgeist of a past era with incisive clarity and significant impact.

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney.  Published in 2017.

“When I was young I admired smart people; now I admire kind (or wise) people.”  Ezra Klein (who is only 36).

If ever an author was able to get into the mind of a brainy millennial, Sally Rooney has succeeded.  Her dialogue and writing approach are contemporary in both style and effect, and her books beg to be read aloud.  She was a debater at Trinity College in Dublin, and eventually became the top debater at the European University Debating Championships in 2013.  Rooney, now 29, Irish and a Marxist, published Conversations with Friends, her first book, in 2017. The book is scheduled to be made into a 12 part BBC/Hulu TV series.  Her second book, Normal People, was published in 2018 and was made into a 12 part BBC/Hulu TV series; the book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and the TV series was nominated for three Emmys, two Golden Globe Awards, and other nominations.  Her third book will be published in 2021.  Rooney is regarded as one of the voices of her generation, and likes to set her characters against the backdrop of our capitalist society.  I don’t, however, see her characterization as being significantly different from any other generation of young people; their manner of technical communication is simply different. 

Frances, the narrator, is a smart, reflective university student, a retiring, shy poet, who performs in poetry readings with her former gay, Communist lover, Bobbi, now her best friend.  Bobbi is in stark contrast with Frances — she is bold, witty, and strikingly beautiful.  They meet Melissa, a well-known, sophisticated, and independent photographer and writer who wants to write a profile about them, and her husband Nick, a quietly passive and handsome actor. Melissa and Nick have an open marriage of sorts — she has had other affairs and he has acquisesced. Bobbi and Melissa engage in a mutual flirtation, which adds to the tension and increasing plot complications.  

As Frances and Nick inch forward in their prickly relationship and eventually an affair, the tone of the affair — the sex, the implications for the other parties, and the effect on them personally — is described in detail, but it is a strange country of chilly desire, and reflects the youthful main character’s (or the author’s) lack of experience in her response to life, love, and sex.  The exploration of their reactions is oddly stilted.  It’s sex for people who don’t know the language of sex or love which, given that it is Frances’s first experience with a man, is understandable, but Nick, older by more than ten years, is also muted and diffident.  In an affair, it is the secrecy, the unobtainability of the other, the forbidden sex, and the emotion which provide the erotic charge, but here both characters act like they’re marching off to an obligatory catechism class.

Despite decades of real change in traditional moral and social perspectives, the characters are not as unconventional as they would like to be.  In fact, Frances seems to have stumbled into a period drama — like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary — where the clichés are the same.  Frances is hemmed in by her attitude toward infidelity, even though she, in theory, rejects the conventional attitude as bourgeois. All of the usual middle class considerations of an affair are there, despite the fact that the young narrator is stridently opposed, in theory, to such banal views.  Again, is it the writer’s lack of experience which seems to limit her imagination or is she merely a funnel through which the character acts out her flat, unexpressive role in this rather airless affair? 

The effect of Rooney’s writing is frequently ambiguous even though the language is very precise, flat, and unemotional; it is matter-of-fact, but the spareness of the dialogue adds an interesting component of simplicity to the plot.  One of their first conversations à deux goes like this:

“(Nick) “Do you think Melissa’s playing favorites? he said.  I’ll have a word with her if you want.

(Frances) It’s okay.  Bobbi is everyone’s favorite.

Really?  I warmed to you more, I have to say.

We looked at each other.  I could see he was playing along with me so I smiled.

Yes, I felt we had a natural rapport, I said.

I’m drawn to the poetic types.

Oh, well.  I have a rich inner life, believe me.

He laughed when I said that.  I knew I was being a little inappropriate, but I didn’t feel too badly about it.  Outside in the conservatory Melissa had lit a cigarette and put her camera down on a glass coffee table.  Bobbi was nodding at something intently.”

They start exchanging emails, frequent one liners:

“(Nick) “We used to have a holiday home in Achill (like every other wealthy South Dublin family I’m sure).

(Frances) “I’m glad my ancestral homeland could help nourish your class identity.  P.S.  It should be illegal to have a holiday home anywhere.”

The other characters in the book come from wealthy families or are well-off themselves, thus blunting the effectiveness of their disdain for capitalism and its dire implications, yet understanding, in principle, the injustice such a system can inflict on less fortunate people. 

A typical email exchange with Bobbi goes like this: 

“Bobbi:  If you look at love as something other than an interpersonal phenomenon

Bobbi:  and try to understand it as a social value system

Bobbi:  it’s both antithetical to capitalism, in that it challenges the axiom of selfishness

Bobbi:  which dictates the whole logic of inequality

Bobbi:  and yet also it’s subservient and facilitatory

Bobbi:  i.e. mothers selflessly raising children without any profit motive

Bobbi:  which seems to contradict the demands of the market at one level

Bobbi:  and yet actually just functions to provide workers for free

me:  yes

me:  capitalism harnesses “love” for profit

me:  love is the discursive practice and unpaid labor is the effect

me:  but I mean, I get that.  I’m anti-love as such

Bobbi:  that’s vapid frances

Bobbi:  you have to do more than say you’re anti things.”

Another element in this affair is that Frances is a sexual masochist, submissive, and self-harms, but the reasons for this are not adequately explored.  Self-injury is not a new phenomenon, nor is it the exclusive domain of adolescent girls.  From biblical times to the medieval religious flagellants and anchorites, to the Victorian Needle-Girls in Europe, to today’s flood of news about self-mutilation in young girls, people have been harming themselves for religious, societal, and emotional reasons. The prevailing thought today is that self-mutilation, usually in younger girls and women, is the way they alleviate and control their anxiety, low self esteem, and acute distress. This behavior seems to be enhanced by ever-present online forms of communication which seems to reinforce the culture of anxiety and competitiveness.  Typically, that kind of behavior comes from a feeling of self-loathing which stems from prior abuse. If one accepts that theory, one can only assume that Frances’s despair is a result of her father’s alcoholism and his separation from her mother.

In reference to a discussion about whether she is “nice,” Frances says:  “I haven’t been the person that I should have been.” Bobbi wonders whether “niceness” is a function of power or the lack thereof.  Frances wonders whether “only women put the needs of others ahead of their own needs?  … is kindness just another form of submission in the face of conflict? … If we can seek compromise and see vulnerability as a kind of courage … we might stop protecting ourselves.” Frances’s political beliefs underlie and conflict with her questions about marriage, infidelity, and subjugation.  She has the usual likes and dislikes of any younger generation. For example, her utter disdain for the poet, W.B.Yeats is revealing and humorous, although I have always liked his poem, “The Second Coming,” for its dark imagery where the “rough beast, its hour comes round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”

These youthful questions and concerns are typical and do not define any one generation. Young people frequently defend the underdog and condemn the world’s various inequities — it is a hallmark of youth.  Their self absorption and sense of entitlement are usually sins of omission, rather than calculated cruelty. They also have a growing awareness that, intelligent as they may be, they still have a lot to learn and experience.  Since no one in this book has a sense of humor, a fatal character flaw, and critical to any kind of satisfactory relationship, be it emotional or practical, they suffer from an over-inflated sense of their own importance, thus leaving the reader with a distinct feeling of annoyance.

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn.  Published in 1992.

“Kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition.”  George Saunders (62 years old).

Some transgressions are worse than others, and 61 year old English writer, Edward St. Aubyn, presents an interesting contrast to the previous book vis-à-vis morality, cruelty, kindness, and submission.  Whereas Conversations with Friends is confrontational, it is not generally angry;  Never Mind is a vicious diatribe against family and society.  Born into an upper-class family with titled connections at every level, St. Aubyn attended Oxford and graduated while he was still a heroin addict.  The semi-autobiographical Never Mind was published in 1992, the first book in the Patrick Melrose series, followed by Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk, and At Last.   Mother’s Milk was released in 2011 as a movie, starring Jack Davenport as Patrick.  In 2018, a five part TV series, Patrick Melrose, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the older Patrick, was released in a Showtime/Sky Atlantic production.  St. Aubyn won the Betty Trask Award for Never Mind, was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize for On the Edge, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Mother’s Milk, and won several other awards for Mother’s Milk and Lost for Words, a novel published in 2014.  His latest book, Double Blind, was published in March, 2021.

St. Aubyn is in rare form as he casts unlimited reserves of vitriol at the upper classes. David, Patrick’s father, is a dilettante, a pianist, a sadist, and, briefly, a former doctor. His goal in life is to manipulate and control.  For amusement and as a prelude to bigger options, David enjoys flooding and drowning ants with a water hose, burning the ants with the tip of his cigar, and making his wife eat rotten figs from the ground in front of guests.  His marriage to Eleanor, a selfish, alcoholic, American dry-cleaning fluid heiress, involves a series of subjugations and humiliations.  He tortures her at every opportunity as she becomes increasingly unable to cope with his intent.  She in turn virtually ignores her son and is blissfully unaware of the abuse her husband ladles out to him. David plays with and manipulates his son, his servant, and some of his mostly horrible friends who are pretentious, snobbish, and unkind.  Patrick, age five and St. Aubyn’s alter ego, is tormented by his father with humiliation and physical and sexual abuse.  

David is a sociopath who plays with his family and guests, alternating brief fits of calculated quasi kindness with cruelty, abusive to wife and son with physical, emotional, and verbal domination.  Patrick’s eventual fall into heroin and alcohol addiction in the second book of the series is a clear result of his father’s abuse and mistreatment and his mother’s avoidance and inability to empathize and take care of him.  Anyone acquainted with the topic of parental cruelty and its frequently disastrous results will be familiar with this intentional pattern of behavior.

Various narrators propel the story forward, each from their own point of view and with unambiguous precision and an unerring eye for detail. Eleanor describes one of her first impressions of David:

“When she had first met David twelve years ago, she had been fascinated by his looks.  The expression that men feel entitled to wear when they stare out of a cold English drawing room onto their own land had grown stubborn over five centuries and perfected itself in David’s face.  It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place, but David left her in no doubt that they did.  He was also descended from Charles II through a prostitute. ‘I’d keep quiet about that, if I were you,’ she had joked when he first told her.  Instead of smiling, he had turned his profile towards her in a way she had grown to loathe, thrusting out his underlip and looking as if he were exercising great tolerance by not saying something crushing.”

As a study of the English upper classes, it is unparalleled.  A particularly English style of cruel discourse and behavior is on full display at a painful dinner party at David and Eleanor’s house, involving Nicholas, David’s wealthy, out-of-shape baronet friend; Bridget, his young and vapid girlfriend; Anne, a kind American journalist and friend of Eleanor’s; and her lover, Victor, an eminent Jewish, but untitled, philosopher. The caustic dinner conversation pits the six guests against each other in alternating desultory and combative fashion.

  “‘Ethics is not the study of what we do, my dear David, but what we ought to do,’ said Victor.

   ‘That’s why it’s such a waste of time, old boy,’ said Nicholas cheerfully.

   ‘Why do you think it’s superior to be amoral?’ Anne asked Nicholas.

   ‘It’s not a question of being superior,’ he said exposing his cavernous nostrils to Anne, ‘it just springs from a desire not to be a bore or a prig.

   ‘Everything about Nicholas is superior,’ said David, ‘and even if he were a bore or a prig, I’m sure he would be a superior one.’”

Or

   “‘Do you despise people from the middle classes? Anne asked.

   ‘I don’t despise people from the middle classes, on the contrary, the further from them, the better,’ said Nicholas, shooting one of his cuffs.  ‘It’s people in the middle classes that disgust me.’

   ‘Can middle-class people be from the middle class in your sense?’

   ‘Oh, yes,’ said Nicholas generously, ‘Victor is an outstanding case.’

   Victor smiled to show he was enjoying himself.

   ‘It’s easier for girls, of course,’ Nicholas continued.  ‘Marriage is such a blessing, hoisting women from dreary backgrounds into a wider world.’ He glanced at Bridget. ‘All a chap can really do, unless he’s the sort of queer who spends his whole time writing postcards to people who might need a spare man, is to toe the line.  And be thoroughly charming and well informed,’ he added with a reassuring smile for Victor.

   ‘Nicholas, of course, is an expert,’ David intervened, ‘having personally raised several women from the gutter.’”

After much withering dialogue, half of the guests leave, leaving David, Nicholas and Eleanor.

“David grinned.  He was in the mood for fun.  After all, what redeemed life from complete horror was the almost unlimited number of things to be nasty about.  All he needed now was to ditch Eleanor, who was twitching silently like a beetle on its back, get a bottle of brandy, and settle down to gossip with Nicholas.  It was too perfect.”

As Conversations with Friends deals with inadvertent cruelty, more typical of thoughtless, arrogant, youthful behavior, Never Mind is a devastating portrait of intentional cruelty and unkindness, with submission the required result. It is a bleak, comedic still life frozen in time; there is no redemption here.  If you enjoy puzzling over human behavior, these two books, different in their approach, writing style, and content, will provide you with a full course dinner of provocation and thought — youthful questioning and searching for answers to love, infidelity, friendship, and career in contrast with complete calcification of emotions and overt cruelty.

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*I am informed by my brother, the expert on all things medieval, that St. Dominic, founder of the Dominican order which became famous for its role in the Inquisition, ironically known as the Holy Inquisition (and who was canonized in 1234), took part in some of the events which led to the demise of the troubadour system.  The decline in the noble courts caused by wars with the Cathars, the Albigensian Crusade, and the subsequent French land grab, and the resulting persecution of the troubadours caused them to flee to Italy, Northern Spain and northern France, ultimately resulting in their disappearance as a class of musicians and court entertainers.  In northern France they were well received and fashionable as performers, even though the French could not understand the Occitan poetry.  (A contemporary of St. Dominic’s was St. Ferdinand III of Castille who was also made a saint because of the prodigious numbers of Muslims he slaughtered.)

**Rooney’s second book, Normal People, which I have recently read, and the excellent 12 part TV series which I have seen, is a much deeper psychological study of essentially the same age group. It features a star-crossed couple à la Tristan and Isolde who love, break up, and reconcile over and over.  It is a dramatic view of the saving power of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Post main image: Planet Stories Love Romances Publishing / Allen Anderson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons