I have been corresponding with a masters student at the Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech who is writing his dissertation on translating storytelling, and in particular in relation to UK storytelling practice. He asked me for some thoughts on storytelling practice, and the article below is the result.
The word ‘storytelling’ is used to mean many different things: it can mean what an actor does on stage or film; it can mean what a dancer or choreographer does; and (most commonly) it can mean what a writer does. However, when I refer to ‘storytelling’ I am talking about the ancient art of oral storytelling in which one or more people recounts a narrative in the absence of a written text. In other words, it is not reading aloud: story reading and storytelling are distinct practices that make very different demands of the person/people speaking, as well as having different effects on their audiences.
In addition to there being no written text, for me, storytelling is about the speaker(s) using their own linguistic resources. If then, I was to start speaking the following:
‘Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever, about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it…’
I would be reciting someone else's language (Charles Dickens’s language, in fact, as this is the opening to A Christmas Carol). Recitation, then, does not use the speaker’s linguistic resources, and therefore is not storytelling. Now, I am aware that there are cultures in which it is expected that a story be conveyed with the same language as it was in the past, and the same words (and sometimes the same gestures and intonation) have been passed down in this way. If this was ever the case in the UK context, it certainly isn’t now, and the existence of written records of past versions of stories means that the oral tradition does not need to preserve the language of previous generations. Of course, it needs to be said that written accounts may preserve the language that a story collector heard, but they do not take account of the non-verbal aspects of storytelling, and it is these non-verbal aspects which convey the significance of the language that the storyteller used. In addition, the existence of multiple versions and common patterns of folktales, in both oral storytelling and written accounts, makes the definitive attribution of any story to an original source very difficult.
What follows is an exploration of what I see as the essential ingredients of storytelling – always remembering that, in time, these ideas may be refined (if I still hold onto them) or abandoned (if at some point I realise the error of my ways). Anyone reading this short paper could reasonably assert that most of the aspects of storytelling that I have identified below could be said (and have been) of other, non-narrative, spoken language; however, storytelling is unique as a form of speech because we constantly use story to make sense of the world: we represent ourselves through the stories we tell, and other people represent themselves by the stories that they tell. Storytelling is, then, an essential life skill.
When we create and tell stories, we apply both our knowledge of the world around us and our knowledge of the language we associate with that world. This doesn’t only apply to the stories in which we retell our own experiences, but when we tell pre-existing narratives as well. Imagine trying to tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood (as it is most commonly told) without knowing what a wolf is, or a grandmother or a forest. This knowledge of the world that we bring to story also allows us to create imaginary and fantasy worlds. Our knowledge that wolves do not communicate through human speech allows us to tell a story which creates wonder at a wolf who can talk, and our experiences of eating food – biting, chewing, swallowing – means that we can surprise by telling of a young girl can emerge unscathed from a wolf’s stomach.
Of course, in order that they can understand the stories that we tell, our story audiences also need to be able to connect our language with points of reference in their worlds. And cultural and geographical distance affect how the story-world that we are creating is being understood. I was talking to a group of student teachers in a teacher education institution in Marrakech and referred to a story about a tree. I asked the students to tell me about the tree, and one of them described a palm tree like those that you will find all over the city of Marrakech, and I pointed out that in my story the tree was an apple tree like the one that was in the garden when I was a child. One word, ‘tree’, and geography and culture dictate that a completely different story-world starts to emerge.
The argument above relies on recognising the life experiences of both tellers and audiences, and I want to suggest that storytelling is essentially a social act, and one that is embodied. Since I started formulating my thinking about the embodied nature of storytelling, the world has experienced the Covid-19 crisis during which storytellers found themselves communicating as disembodied performers contained in two-dimensions on a computer monitor courtesy of Zoom, Teams, etc. However, I will continue to hold onto the notion that storytelling is at its most powerful when teller(s) and audience share the same space. Ever since I first read Vivian Gussin-Paley’s words that storytelling ‘is a shared process, a primary cultural institution… the social art of language’[1], I have not been able to think of it in any other way.
With that phrase ‘the social art of language’ in mind, I aim for my storytelling to be dialogic, which means that I need to respond to my audience throughout my telling. This is much harder to do over the internet, and there has been much debate among storytellers about the best approaches to online storytelling, but in the end the story is still embodied by me as a teller, even if I am not present in the room with the audience. How deeply I breathe, when I breathe, and where I place my breath in my body mean that the story and the language that I use is embodied. And the same can be said of the various qualities of physical tension, the use of facial expression, gesture, tone of voice, vocal volume, gaze, use of the space, etc. In the end, the tales that we tell are manifested physically as much as they are linguistically.
Finally, in storytelling we make connections. As I said at the beginning, much of what is said here can be applied to any kind of sustained spoken language. However, in storytelling the connections that are created are particular.
As already discussed above, we have to make connections between the language that we use and the world as we know it (and as our audiences know it), but in addition, we have to be able to construct temporal sequences that make sense, so that the events connect, unfolding one after the other.
Throughout any narrative, we also need to make a series of cause-and-effect connections. The easiest way of revealing these is to go backwards through the events of a story:
· Why was Little Red Riding Hood rescued from the wolf’s stomach – because she was eaten by the wolf
· Why did the wolf eat Little Red riding Hood – because he is a predatory animal who was hungry
· Why did Little Red Riding Hood trust the wolf – because he was dressed in her grandmother’s clothes and lying in her grandmother’s bed
· Why did Little Red Riding Hood go through the forest – because her grandmother, who was sick, lived there.
While these cause-and-effect connections work on the event level, they do the same at a much more finely grained level. So, Little Red Riding Hood is called ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ because of the clothing she wears; she knocks on grandmother’s cottage door because it is closed; she has food for grandmother because she has carried a basket of provisions through the forest.
Speaking of the forest, we also have to create a coherent story world for our audience, where spatial elements connect logically to form the settings for events. It would be unexpected, for example, if Little Red Riding Hood was skipping through the forest and decided to stop for a meal in the fast-food restaurant that she was passing. Of course, we could surprise the audience by introducing a fast-food restaurant into the story, but the surprise pre-supposes that we (teller and audience) already have a series of connected elements in our minds that make up a conventional forest, and that a fast-food restaurant does not fit within those connections.
Finally, and most significantly in relation to story (rather than any other use of language), everything that we say, and every embodied expression that gives meaning to what we say, needs to connect (even if not immediately) to those human or human-like intentions[2] that drive the stories that we tell.
[1] Gussin Paley, V. (1990) The boy who would be a helicopter: the uses of storytelling in the classroom Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press: 23
[2] Bruner, J (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press p13
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