Response to "What Are the Rules? Part 1"

As I was jetting at 30,000 feet between Lyon-Satolas and Newark International, it was at the precise moment we encountered some turbulence that I was reading Alan Irvine’s article "What Are the Rules?" And, as you know, there is nothing better than white knuckling it during turbulence to focus yourself...

I think we will have continued questioning on this topic of what makes a good telling, as in any of the arts. It is an interesting and, at the same time, difficult, if not frustrating question. Some three years ago the French storytellers got together near Paris around the theme "Storytelling as a Performing Art." The Director of the National Circus School was among those invited to that colloquium. And I got to thinking of the circus arts and made a comment about how one judges if you have successfully accomplished the practice of the circus arts. When you think of it, with juggling, you have any number of balls, although three is a good starting point, and you can tell without the shadow of a doubt if the person has succeeded in juggling — because either the balls are in the air or they are on the ground. Professional jugglers of course can see when you are doing a "sloppy" juggle. But at the basic level, if you can keep your three balls airborne we have a criterion. Could we storytellers find this kind of objective criterion to gauge workshop participants in regards to a good telling?

One could extend this analogy to sports. If you score or win a game or match, at least you can say you are correctly playing the game. But of course, "it’s not if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game" remains valid. Then again, you at least have that objective measure of points.

If you take a discipline like classical dance, certain precise muscular and geometrical corporal positions constitute figures in a ballet. It is very easy for a choreographer to judge if someone is accomplishing an ‘entrechat’ or a ‘pas chasse.’ Again, what might an equivalent be for the verbal rendering of a story?

All of us as professionals have had that magical moment or evening when you know deep down in your soul, and by the audience’s reaction that, yes, this is good storytelling. But as happened once to Sir Lawrence Olivier after a brilliant first half of a Shakespearean play, when the director came to his dressing room to congratulate him on his performance, he found Olivier head in hands and looking distraught. He asked Olivier why he was so down trodden as his performance was so stunning. Olivier replied, "I know it is stunning... But I don’t know why!"

I’ll just finish with what I feel is a very touching anecdote about what happened to me one day in the late eighties. I lived in a blue collar quarter of Lyons, France. One day I invited the immigrant children of our North African Arab neighbors from the house next door to an impromptu session of some tales I wanted to practice. After the session an adorable little girl came over to me and thanked me for the beautiful tales I had told. I thanked her back and asked her name. She answered, "Schaherezade." That day at least I think I got the juggling right...

Sam Cannarozzi

 

Your article, "What Are the Rules?" was helpful in asserting what I had been not able to articulate so clearly as different rules for the different genre. Your comments on Ghost Stories were timely for me as I am currently reviewing tapes submitted for a ghost story concert at the Northlands conference. I don’t agree that the intent of a good ghost story must always be scary, though that is a common element. I, and I know many others, include a wider range of stories that explore that area at and beyond the borders of life in time. I think the Resurrection and appearance stories in the 20th chapter of John are strong Ghost Stories. While there are the elements of fear in these stories, church culture has so numbed us to them it is a real challenge to tell them in a way that people identify with the fear that was clearly a part of the characters’ responses. It is to this point that storytellers can be of great use in re-humanizing the stories and returning to them the power of oral tradition. Interestingly the account has the disciples more afraid of the "authorities" than of Jesus’ mysterious appearances. However, the point of the story is not to scare people, but to bring them to a new understanding of the life beyond life.

Karl Hallsten

 

Alan Irvine responds:
Karl Hallsten touches on a good point, and I fear he has caught me in a bit of careless writing. I agree that not all stories with ghosts in them are necessarily designed to be scary. I often make the distinction between "ghost stories" and "stories with ghosts in them," (but failed to do so in my article.) In the latter category, for example, I would include the large number of humorous folktales about encounters with spirits.
Perhaps a better term for the first group would be "scary stories." (After all, not all scary stories require a ghost. The best, most scary story in my own repertoire has nothing of the supernatural in it at all.) "Ghost stories" is the traditional term, and seems to flow from the tongue more gracefully than "scary stories." But that still leaves us with stories that are designed to scare, and do something more — and often the something more is the more important element. The resurrection stories would fall into this group, as would stories of ghostly romance, where a living person falls in love, knowingly or unknowingly, with a ghost. (The movie "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" is a classic example of these stories.) Although the ghostly romances carry an element of scary, our primary reaction is sadness or melancholy.
How do these fit into the scheme? Perhaps we should view them as examples of the artist deliberately breaking the rules, of the storyteller playing with the rules of the genre, setting up our expectations of fear to come, only to subvert them and take the story in a new direction. That new direction carries more force than it otherwise might have precisely because it contrasts with the way the story is ‘supposed’ to play out.

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