In 1995 I attended the war crimes trial of Imre Finta. Courtrooms are fascinating places from a storyteller’s perspective. A person stands up in court and has the chance to tell his/her version of the truth. A prisoner can give her word and be granted “parole,” from the French for “spoken word.” Finta was the first person to be tried under Canada’s war crimes legislation. He was accused of being in charge of the gendarmerie in his small Hungarian town. On his watch, close to nine thousand of his fellow citizens—Jews and inmates from the local asylum—were corralled by his officers in a brickyard conveniently located by the train tracks. These “undesirables” were loaded under his supervision onto trains bound for Poland and Germany. Very few of them ever came back.
He was eventually acquitted, though, as far as I could tell, the jury didn’t seem to doubt that he was indeed the man who did the appalling deeds. But it is far easier to convict a mugger than someone like Finta, who was, after all, the most minor cog in the machinery of the Third Reich. Apparently he carried out his duties with no special anti-Semitic enthusiasm or Nazi fervour. He wasn’t even a member of the party; just a small-town policeman who followed his conscience. Unfortunately, his conscience said Obey. The consequence of this kind of obedience was, as we know now, the destruction of several thousand lives from his town, and several million more across Europe.
I went to the trial because I wanted to hear the stories people told. At times, it seemed that memory itself was the real defendant, not the feeble, harmless-looking excaptain. Each witness took the stand, testifying in Hungarian-accented English or through a translator about things they’d seen or experienced almost fifty years before, mostly in a state of paralyzing terror. The bridge of remembrance seemed rickety indeed as the defense lawyer questioned every detail: “Eight bodies in front of the police station? But in your first deposition you mentioned only six. I submit that you are not able to accurately recollect the events of that particular day.” Even so, piece by tortured piece, the story slowly emerged. The brickyard was a hellish place, filled with women and children and mental patients. Their men had already been taken away. They had little food, no shelter, they’d lost their homes; most of them would end up in the death camps that lay at the end of the track.
Curiously, there was one detail that appeared in almost every testimony. The captain, rather vain as he lorded it over his brickyard empire, liked to wear beautifully polished black riding boots. He’d stand on a platform in the middle of his heartbroken charges, and even decades later they all remembered him by those impossibly brilliant boots. The black boots shone so that you could almost see your reflection in them. The witnesses were as old as their former nemesis. They told their stories patiently at the trial, knowing, I suppose, that soon enough they’d be gone and the story would be the only thing left. And perhaps that was the real value of the trial—not to convict or acquit, but to bear witness: remember and retell.
The stories of people’s life-experiences make a rich and inexhaustible source of inspiration for storytellers as I find each time I do another Telling Bee. Life itself is, of course, one big Telling Bee. Extraordinary stories are exchanged constantly—at work, around the kitchen table, on long car-rides. Storytellers keep an ear cocked for these sagas and legends of human life, including their own; they are often able to make them memorable in conversation. The Israeli storyteller Shlomo Abbas once told me the mark of a great storyteller was that he or she could keep him entertained not only from the stage, but also during the cab-ride on the way to the concert hall. “Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn,” wrote Walter Benjamin in his superb essay “The Storyteller.” Of all the arts, storytelling is perhaps the one that draws most deeply from this pool of shared human experience.
If your hunting and gathering takes you near the story traditions of aboriginal peoples, it’s wise to remember that oral culture has its own decorum and unwritten principles. Although many Native stories have been published in books, both by Native writers and by non-Native anthropologists, ethnographers and writers, there is still a strong feeling, at least in Canada, that these stories should be approached with great respect by people from outside the tradition. It’s not enough to simply learn a First Nations story from a book. Go spend time with the elders. Sit and listen. Pay attention to their stories, even if you don’t always follow the narrative thread. Elders have a way of leading you not to where you think you should get to but to where they think you need to go. Above all, don’t interrupt!
On visits to the Yukon, I’d sometimes hear Angela Sidney tell old-time stories from her Tagish and Tlingit traditions. If I, running on big-city time, jumped in with a question, she’d shush me and retell the parts she was afraid I might have missed in my impatience. When I was editing Next Teller: A Book of Canadian Storytelling, the Anishnabe storyteller Gilbert Oskaboose allowed me to include some of his stories about Nanabush. In doing so he warned me eloquently and in no uncertain terms not to change the stories in any way: “These are ancient and sacred tales of the northern Ojibway and I hold them in trust—temporarily.” As they were passed on to him, so must they be kept intact for the next reader or listener.
If you do learn about Native oral traditions only from books, you should know that in Canada and around the world there has been a recent flourishing of creativity by aboriginal authors, editors, historians and filmmakers. Tellers from many different First Nations have found a way to bring their living oral traditions into literary form. Alexander Wolfe, in the preface to his extraordinary book Earth Elder Stories, explains the difficult path that led to his decision to write in English, not Saulteaux, the oral stories of his people:
To be responsible for retelling the stories of the grandfathers today, the Anishnaybay must renew their commitment to the oral tradition. At the same time, we must turn to a written tradition and use it to support, not destroy, our oral tradition. The structure of our society in the days when the grandfathers were still with us was very different from what we have today. Information and instruction were transmitted to us orally, in story form, by our old people. Listening and absorbing what was told required great lengths of time. The use of the mind and memory were important; this is why the stories were told over and over again. The environment of that time held nothing to distract the listener and the storyteller. Today many things distract the listener and disrupt the storytelling. Radio, television, video, and printed material take precedence in the everyday lives of many children, and even the adults, in our present society. We are ceasing to be storytellers and listeners, and in so doing we are losing that great virtue called patience, so strongly emphasized by the grandfathers. If we are to preserve the stories that contain our history we must restore the art, practice, and principles of oral storytelling. We must also commit our oral history to written form. That written form, however, must still comply with the wishes and aspirations of the grandfathers, now long gone from our numbers.
After long consideration, Wolfe created a written record that he felt honoured his tradition: “The prime responsibility of the storyteller or oral historian, therefore, is to ensure that the stories are preserved intact and unaltered. To take out or add content to these stories destroys the truth found therein.” However much non-native storytellers love these splendid creation myths, histories and teaching stories, they must not assume that their affinity guarantees the right to retell them. And if you do work with traditional Native narratives, whether you meet them orally or in print, remember Alexander Wolfe’s warning and take the care necessary to preserve and respect them.
One of the deepest impulses of a story collector is to keep stories alive that might otherwise disappear unheard. Yaffa Eliach, in her collection Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, described both survivors’ desire to tell their stories and her own impulse to record them as a powerful imperative. “Many a time, on a New York subway or on an international flight, strangers have walked over to say how
grateful they are for the opportunity to tell their children, and posterity, of their suffering during the war. Some speak in torrents, others in a few restrained sentences.” As a collector and editor of these stories, Eliach “constantly sensed that the tale entrusted to me was a living witness, a quivering soul. The painful spoken words were a memorial to a family, to a mother, father, brothers, sisters, the only testimony to their ever having existed on this blood-soaked earth. Now the responsibility rested with me, to pass on the legacy of their lives and deaths. If the tale fails, the only imprint of their existence will be a patch of blackened sky and a handful of scattered ashes.” This instinct to give voice to what must never be forgotten lends extra purpose to every storyteller who ventures forth to hunt and gather the world’s stories.
There’s an old Jewish joke about a rabbi who was renowned for his storytelling ability. He always seemed to have the right story for any moment that arose in life. His student, marvelling at the rabbi’s great skill, once asked him the secret. How did he know what story to tell, and when, and to whom? The rabbi, not surprisingly, answered: That reminds me of a story!
There was once a young man who went off to become a great sharpshooter. He studied for years, mastering every skill of marksmanship. Finally, after graduating at the top of his class, he wanted to ride home and show his parents and friends his fantastic ability. As he was riding along, he passed through a little village. On the side of the road was a broken-down barn. On the side of the barn somebody had painted one hundred targets. And, to the young man’s amazement, in the middle of each target someone had shot a perfect bull’s-eye. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Reining in his horse, he stared and stared at this incredible sight. Then he looked around the poor village. He called out, “Who has done this great feat? Where is the world’s greatest sharpshooter?” A little girl walked across the road. “I did it,” she said, scuffling her shoes in the sand. “You?” he said. “I can’t believe it. I’ve studied for years, I’ve learned every skill of sharpshooting; but even I could never do such a thing. What’s your secret, little girl?” “Let me explain,” she said. “You see, I don’t draw the target first. First I shoot, then I draw the target.”
Where the joke ends, the commentary begins. In the American storyteller Penninah Schram’s telling, it is the Dubner Maggid (a famous travelling rabbi and teacher in the eighteenth century) who tells the parable. He explains, “I don’t always know the right story for the subject being discussed. What I do is read many stories, and listen to many stories, and remember all of these stories. Then when I find a story I want to tell, I introduce the subject that leads me into telling that perfect story.”
The message might equally be that when you go through life with a headful of good stories, it’s never hard to find a moment that seems to call for that story, whether you plan it or not. The stories are there, waiting to be heard and overheard. Our mission as storytellers is to gather them, story by story, until one day you find you have, indeed, a story to tell for every occasion.
THUNDER OVER THE LIBRARY
A story is a letter that comes to us from yesterday. Each man who tells it adds his word to the message and sends it on to tomorrow.
G. AND H. PAPASHVILY, Yes and No Stories
FOR MOST CONTEMPORARY STORYTELLERS the local library is our elder. Much of my repertoire has been harvested and adapted from written sources. As the storytelling renaissance grows, there are more and more stories to be gathered from other tellers’ books—always with their permission, of course. But there are also more and more live sources, traditional tellers active in many parts of the world, and they usually welcome new listeners and even apprentices. A story that comes to you that way, directly via the oral tradition, will often set deep roots in your life and repertoire.
I remember hearing the great Anishnabe storyteller and historian Basil Johnston telling a story nearly thirty years ago. Somehow, even though I don’t have a particularly good memory, his words went straight in, and I’ve been able to remember the story verbatim ever since. Mind you, even when you remember a story perfectly, it’s no guarantee you’ll be able to tell it. Augusta Baker, one of the finest tellers of the twentieth century, came to a library where I was teaching a class. She told “The Woodcutter of Gura,” an Ethiopian story by Harold Courlander in his book The Fire on the Mountain. She reduced—or elevated—us to helpless laughter with her deadpan rendition of the story. I swore to myself I’d learn it, and I’ve tried and tried—but it just won’t come to my tongue. Yet I’ve got her telling deeply and unforgettably inscribed in my soul.
Besides these rare experiences of direct oral transmission, most of us contemporary tellers find our stories in books. In an oral culture you have the chance to hear many tellers tell stories on many occasions, but in the library it’s different: you must develop your own strategies for finding, sifting, evaluating and choosing stories. I’ve included a brief compendium of my own eclectic sources (including full information on all the books mentioned and quoted) at the back of this book, but any comprehensive 398.2—folk and fairy tales—section will offer a treasure house of traditional oral literature.
The most important thing to remember as you search through old and new books is that there are no official editions of traditional stories; only versions upon versions, a multiplicity of tellings and translations and adaptations. From this wide-open field you may select the ones that best suit your own telling style and philosophy. I’d like to suggest a certain approach that, while it isn’t particularly methodical or scholarly, does give an inner sense of a story’s quality. This approach is based on paying attention to pattern. The question to ask is this: Does the author present his/her story with the pattern intact, or are you getting a diminished, less-realized telling? To make this question useful, you need to know several versions of the story you’re thinking of learning. While this doesn’t necessarily mean becoming a folklorist or scholar, it does mean spending unhurried time in the stacks, following the trail of the story wherever it leads.
As you skim, browse and make your way around 398.2, you will notice that the boundaries of the books you find there are amazingly porous. The same story pattern shows up in a collection from China and in an Irish variant, translated from Ashanti and in a Yiddish accent, told by Scheherazade and by an Ojibway elder. Hodja Nasrudin from Turkey reappears as Juha in Morocco, one of the fools of Chelm in Poland, and, with more wisdom than foolishness, as King Akbar’s counsellor Birbal in India. The story is never exactly the same, of course—the words change, the names of the characters vary, the events take on local colouring—but enough of the pattern remains intact for you to recognize the story across the range of its various expressions. It is like a slipknot on a much-spliced rope: hemp or nylon, the knot keeps its own integrity. Not only that, but within a specific national tradition the same story title can bespeak a surprisingly diverse set of tellings (“Cinderella” by Perrault, for example, differs mightily from the earthy French peasant version). And even within the work of a single author—Wilhelm Grimm is the most famous example—a story can be rewritten through succeeding editions (see One Fairy Story Too Many by John Ellis for a critical perspective on the Grimms’ propensity for rewrites). The patterns of traditional stories seem designed to outlast any particular interpretation of them. They act as narrative force-fields, generating and defining a number of possible tellings.
A. B. Lord, in his classic study of the bardic tradition The Singer of Tales, refers to the “multiformity” of oral literature. He and Milman Parry travelled through the highlands of Yugoslavia exploring a still-living world of epic storytelling. They observed that in an oral milieu there was no fixed and standard text of a given tale, no “authorized edition.” There is a living and interconnected web of all the stories a teller has heard, heard of, and performed. The essential pattern of an oral tale lives not as a static entity but, in Lord’s telling phrase, through the “constant re-creation of it.” A traditional storyteller lea
rns, perforce, to cultivate a tenacious regard for these patterns, which underlie and unify his/her tradition. David Bynum, in his book The Daemon in the Wood writes, in the same vein as Lord: “The text of oral narrative is the whole tradition, not the single tale.” Only by hearing the same story told in several ways by several tellers do you come to understand its deepest patterns.
Lord describes the working conditions of his Yugoslavian bards, and one can sense the power of their commitment to pattern as the basis of their art. They typically performed in roadside cafés: “The farmers of the nearby villages drop in… They come and go. The townspeople join them. There are shopkeepers and caravan drivers who have come in with merchandise… They are a critical audience.” Critical, gossipy and restless—with an audience like that it’s no wonder each telling was different. These epic singers had to be masters of improvisation, able to reweave strands of narrative, to stretch or condense, to bring on the battle scene when the inebriated shepherd started calling for a round of double rakis—and all without missing a beat on the gusle. Half the time they didn’t even get to finish; as Lord drily notes, the reason why “different singings of the same song by the same man vary most in their endings is that the end of a song is sung less often by the singer.”
Suddenly They Heard Footsteps Page 11
