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Author
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Comment
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tlchang37
Registered User
(10/30/02 10:29:18 pm)
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*Power* in storytelling and tales
I've been musing over this topic for a number of days now, and thought I would avail myself of the wisdom and experience of the folks here...
There is a lot of 'power' in the written and spoken word - power to move your emotions, change your viewpoint or even world view. Power to increase your understanding and empathy. Power to heal and connect... Fairy tales, folklore and mythology seem particularly able to do this without diluting their emotional impact over time and retelling (assuming, of course, that the stories are not diluted themselves in the retelling).
This doesn't seem to work as well, at least for me, with "personal" stories... I can have or hear of a personal experience which feels very powerful on the first or second telling, but which then quickly loses emotive potency if re-told or re-heard successive times. I don't know if this is a function of ineffective storytelling or something else... The experience actually seems to 'lose power' or potency the more it is repeated.
Do you think that could actually be happening on a somewhat literal level? Or does one become desensitized to its potency just by familiarity (although that doesn't seem to happen so much with fairy tales, so why does it with more personal stories?).
Have those of you who are storytellers especially have any thoughts or explanations for this phenomena, or is it not univeral - just me?
Musing,
Tara
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isthmus
nekoi
Registered User
(11/3/02 6:31:50 pm)
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Re: *Power* in storytelling and tales
Well, I'm going to have a Jungian slant on things, but this is my take on your post:
Usually when a person tells a moving but *personal* story, the power comes from the connection you find w/the story and its the archetypal patterns you can connect w/and empathize w/. However, in more personal tales, these patterns are working on a literal level. The deeper symbolic threads w/i that personal tale have been 'pinned' onto something concrete and specific culturally, historically, geographically etc. However, w/fairy tales, the symbols are more impersonal, more nonsensical, basically less literal, or not 'pinned' onto anything. While fairy tales are also born from cultural, historical etc constructs, they tend to have a much more impersonal nature, sometimes characters will actually be nameless. Also, the character development of the individual is not emphasized as much w/personal stories. Personal stories are almost always about character development. I'm not saying fairy tales don't have really interesting characters, only it seems to me that fairy tales focus on the system or structure itself (usually in resolving a conflict w/i the system ie. a king and three princes need to find the missing feminine element, a princess etc for their ailing kingdom).
oops, I should add that that's why fairy tales are so powerful; by focusing on the system, on the relations b/w individuals instead of the individuals themselves, they are more open to multiple perspectives which is therefore more condusive to repeated readings/retellings etc than personal tales.
Edited by: isthmus nekoi at: 11/3/02 6:33:47 pm
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Gregor9
Registered User
(11/4/02 10:45:32 am)
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Universalizing
Tara,
While I agree with the archetypal idea--that the fairy tale is working closer to our reptilian core than, say, your "personal"story and so hover lightly above the collective unconscious--I don't know that I'd describe what they're doing as "impersonal" as much as "universalized". I think most of us fiction writers hope that we take whatever element in our fiction inspires us to write it (which is often something very personal), and make it universal enough to attract an audience which maybe knows nothing of our particular obsession/bent, etc. It's why I can read something like Amos Tutuola's "How I brought death into the world" over and over again despite its unreality, its foreign voice and context. So in a sense, I think the power comes from how well the writer makes what happens to the one person felt by many readers in many places.
However, Jill Ker Conway, a memoirist, has had much the same thing to say about fashioning the memoir, which likely falls into the category of the personal story. But then, she approaches the memoir from the perspective that it is a form of fiction, too--that all memory is really a fiction, and thus none of it adheres exactly to reality "as it happened." It may be that perspective which makes her work as rewarding (to me anyway) as a folk tale.
Greg
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tlchang37
Registered User
(11/4/02 2:22:34 pm)
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Universalizing
I concur with the idea of Universal Archetypes making fairy tales long-lived and more universally applicable. I haven't really studied enough Jung to know, but maybe one never really 'outgrows' the archetypes and therefore they will continue to speak to you, over and over again. (Those of you out there who tell stories frequently - Jane? Clarissa? others?- is that true for you? Can you tell the same tale repeatedly and still feel the same *punch*? Or does it lose some of it's potency?)
If I understand what isthmus nekoi is saying, personal stories probably tend more to individual character development, rather than the larger archetypical motifs. The kind of story I am thinking about is also more along the lines of 'slices' of life/personal breakthroughs/pivotal experiences - a more "singular experience" rather than the longer 'journey' of most tales. Of course, that would not be as universal. And therefore after a few tellings or hearings, you will have 'gotten' it. Absorbed all you can from that experience, and are ready to move on (have 'outgrown'? it, in contrast to the archetypal themes of fairy tales...? *Does* one ever 'outgrow' archetypes? where they no longer speak to you?)
Hmmm. Don't know if I am expressing this coherently at all. Does this make any sense?
Tara
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(11/4/02 7:44:34 pm)
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Jung, nein.
This subject is a very interesting one to me, but I am firmly anti-Jungian where supposed universal archetypes are concerned (based on experience with non-European oral-literary traditions). I've already ranted too much on the subject and won't repeat myself. I will allow that such "archetypes" might well hold in a limited way, as far as European-derived cultures & readers are concerned.
I'd like to offer two other aspects of folk literature that I think might contribute to the "power" of the material. One was discussed in an article by Gene Hammel, I believe, on the Goldilocks story. Unfortunately I can no longer find the reference to this article, but it was reprinted as one of the Addison Wesley Modules in Anthropology. It was a response to the 1970s debates over Levi-Straussian "structures" in myth and folk tale, and Hammel's argument, based on the history of Goldilocks versions, was that symbolic structures of opposition and inversion and tension and resolution accrued and deepened in the story as it was told and retold; the process of retelling by different story tellers "cooked" it in a certain way. This argument always reminded me of the beauty of vernacular (folk) architecture styles and how they result from generation after generation of builders refining and perfecting the proportions, not through formal training or application of theory but just through the eye alone.
A second aspect is one I've never really felt I've managed to put my finger on, but Max Luthi is getting near it in his discussion of characteristics of fairy tales: the peculiar "isolation, " for example, of fairy tale objects from their environment. One of the proposed panel topics for this year's upcoming Philcon was on the subject of magical objects. Panelists are invited to discuss why a magical ring works but other objects might not. My first reaction was that a ring or a spindle has all kinds of other symbolic associations, while a spoon, to us, doesn't; but I wonder if you "isolate" a spoon and give it strange characteristics whether it *could* work as a magical object: a hero finds a single golden spoon in a fishing net, or in a frog's stomach. Part of what Luthi is talks about is the way a fairy tale disconnects some things that in everyday reality are usually connected (a spoon is disconnected from the ordinary context of eating), gives it unusual characteristics of one sort or another (golden) and connects it other things which usually are not (frogs), in a way that is very intriguing to our back brains.
Not even two cents' worth, just a scatter of farthings.
Judith
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Midori
Unregistered User
(11/5/02 4:22:39 am)
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objects
Judith,
I agree with your observations about the ability of ordinary objects to be recontextualized and made symbolic or at least powerful in a tale--in unfamiliar ways. Harold Scheub discusses this very process in African oral traditions in his examination of the fantastic images in tales. He suggests that they come in part from two different resources: the "inherited" traditional images--those with a long and lustrous history behind them, gathering symbolic weight and importance and serving as a connection to the traditional history of the tales and those that are pulled into service by the contemporary story teller--not necessarily having the same sort of grand historical meaning, but an importance that is constructed within the context of a given tale. A spoon--by its function and highlighted appearance within the tale--may in the mouth of an excellent story teller acquire enough symbolic or at least metaphorical weight to stand along side those older images. It is also one way in which a tale can be refreshed, made more contemporary while at the same time connected to the traditional lineage of the tale. Spoons, cooking pots, a needle, thimbles, a cattle horn, weaving shuttles..(hmm..all those ordinary domestic objects of a storyteller's life) are reinvested with power by the skillful way in which a storyteller gives them an active role in the tale. And yes! by placing them in odd places, giving them unexpected functions (a spoon that dispenses wishes) sandwiches together new layers of meanings and possiblities. Scheub collected three epics (each performance about one hundred hours long--and told over about twenty consecutive days) by a Xhosa performer, Mazithatu Zenani. The three epics while organized around around a recognizible narrative thread from the hero (or in this case heroine) tales is packed with lovely smaller tales that when taken together form an oral cultural history of Xhosa women's lives (at least according to Mrs. Zenani). All those details, those objects, slowly gather importance when given both ordinary and extraordinary functions within the entire epic--in a way it becomes a catalogue of a woman's life and gives importance to virtually every item in that life...not because the objects themselves are "archtypes" but because a woman's life should be celebrated, exaulted even in its seeming ordinariness.
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Gregor9
Registered User
(11/5/02 1:42:19 pm)
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Re: Objects
Midori,
By the process you (or Mrs. Zenani) describe, then, the objects accumulate power precisely *because* of their duality? That they remain contextually of the world as well as developing a significance outside it? Am I getting that right?
Greg
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Midori
Unregistered User
(11/5/02 2:18:05 pm)
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repetition and function
Greg,
In part yes--they retain the tension of the ordinary, functioning in an extraordinary fashion--giving a sort of acclaimation of the details of human life--much like the bride in the hero epic, when they are not just women but fantastic women at that, affirm in the concrete image the abstract idea of the bride's important role/status within the community; her gifts of fertility, the future of the community in her. However, it is how the images of the ordinary are patterned, manipulated in the story that suggests their symbolic importance--a spoon can be just a spoon--but when it becomes a key ingredient in a repeated act, or when it is paralleled to a series of domestic objects that perform a series of fantastic events, then the ordinary object becomes significant, highlighted. A comb may be used to make a young woman lovely--but it can also be tossed behind one to create mountains. So a comb by itself doesn't carry the mythological/archetypal weight of being a mountain creater--it is only in the story where it, along with a series of other objects (the comb, the thimble, the needle) each perform a part of a repetative fantastic act. They are magical in this moment and they are symbolic because of the emphasis (through repetition and patterning) the performer has elected to give them in this story.
I hope this makes some kind of sense--it was a long teaching day and I'm not sure I am very clear!
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Jane Yolen
Unregistered User
(11/5/02 2:28:17 pm)
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More?
But there would be a further weight, Midori, in "the comb, the thimble, the needle." That is the connection of those three things to woman's daily life, yes? They are bound together in daily life and then again in the magical life.
I think of the comb on the Pictish stones, along with the hand mirror, which are weighted to point to the female.
Jane
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isthmus
nekoi
Registered User
(11/5/02 3:56:32 pm)
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Re: More?
I should've known better than to play the archetype card first ^_~ but I'll admit that unpopular as Jung (and psychoanalysis in general) is these days, his writings have influenced me greatly.
To clarify what I said since I wasn't really to the point in my last post: I'd like to propose that the protagonist of the traditional fairy tale is really the dynamics, the relations, the proportions of the overlying system being depicted. This is not to say that individual characters are not important; they are extremely important! But their importance lies w/i the greater context of the story, how they function w/i the narrative, and not w/i themselves. Most personal stories whether its a slice of life type thing, or a traditional epic novel (sorry, I'm not an English student, I know there's a better term for this T_T) has a clear protagonist and the system is understood in relation to the main character(s) instead of the other way round (characters understood in relation to the system).
"That they remain contextually of the world as well as developing a significance outside it?"
Greg, this is a wonderful way of describing the function of a symbol, if you don't mind me drawing the parallel. I think the power of symbols lie in their ambiguity (and I mean this in its original sense; ambi meaning both ways), or duality; their ability to hold contradictions, and to function in both the real and fantastic.
"So a comb by itself doesn't carry the mythological/archetypal weight of being a mountain creater--it is only in the story where it, along with a series of other objects (the comb, the thimble, the needle) each perform a part of a repetative fantastic act." Excellent point, Midori. The question I'd like to raise is this; we often view technology as a tool we control and master, that b/c we've created them, we can dictate how they are to be used, and perhaps we alone ascribe to them a symbolic value... however, how much control does our technology have over us, and how do the tools we use in turn influence our behaviour, perceptions etc? In other words, can we view the ascription of symbolic value in fairy tales as a top down model, or is it more like a feedback model?....
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Midori
Unregistered User
(11/6/02 4:19:17 am)
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domestics and dialectics
Jane: yes, yes! the inclusion of all those small objects--items from a woman's life--as they are turned into symbols of power provide an important affirmation of a woman's life; elevates her status (at least in the stories) out of the ordinary and into the potentially powerful and fantastic.
Isthmus: that is the old question of the dialectical relationship between society and culture? What aspects of culture do we shape out of our desire to go in that direction and what aspects of culture are a result of having gone there. Hmm...need more time to formualte an answer--in part because I find it difficult to compare our modern anxiety about technology (think of Blade Runner--or almost any story by P.K.Dick and William Gibson) to the use of the household objects in tales...which seem so benign by comparision--arising out of every day life.
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(11/6/02 7:06:05 am)
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individual and system
>This is not to say that individual characters are not important; they are extremely important! But their importance lies w/i the greater context of the story, how they function w/i the narrative, and not w/i themselves.
JB: This is the very kind of distinction that is often drawn between "traditional" societies (or certain kinds thereof) and out contemporary one -- an individual is less important as a unique ego than in terms of his or her social identities -- as a node in the larger social "system." Which might be one way of reading the journey of the adolescent fairytale hero -- from being a child with no particular social identity into a fully social adult (in this traditional sense). Kwakwaka'wakw initiation myths follow the general fairytale pattern in many ways, but they are about descent-group ancestors, and what they are about is the acquisition of the hereditary privileges of the secular-age chiefs, who publicly represent and even in a metaphoric sense embody the descent group... in other words the stories are about the system, not the individual story heroes.
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(11/6/02 7:13:36 am)
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inner and outer
>I find it difficult to compare our modern anxiety about technology (think of Blade Runner--or almost any story by P.K.Dick and William Gibson) to the use of the household objects in tales...which seem so benign by comparision--arising out of every day life.
JB: In the folk tale use of such benign household objects as comb or spindle, the realm of the ordinary and domestic are extended outward, "colonizing" the external world. But, seems to me, a lot of the contemporary anxiety about technology is exactly the reverse -- the dangerous external world intrudes into what ought to be the safe and dependable domestic realm. Ray Bradbury's owner-devouring household appliances... Windows OS... need I say more?
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Midori
Unregistered User
(11/6/02 2:04:34 pm)
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slanted thinking
Judith,
The idea of the comb/spindle colonizing the external world is interesting--but I am wondering if that is what they do? Those objects seem less to subject the external world (here the fantastic world of the forest) than to be colonized by it--and to act not in accordance with the domestic "home" world use, but the newly invented bestowed fantastic function--creating a paradox--the spoon at home and the spoon in its fantastic configuration--out there in the fantastic.
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isthmus
nekoi
Registered User
(11/6/02 3:50:21 pm)
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Re: slanted thinking
Midori> Yes, I see how that would relate to the relationship b/w human culture and the environment it interacts with. It's a fine line to walk when talking about symbols - where influence arises from and how it functions socially.
As for the difference b/w modern technology and household items, this is an interesting distinction to make and definetely a valid one. Perhaps the anxiety stems from the hubris we hold when creating and using such technology. Unlike technology created before industrialization/modernity, the technology we create now are much more explicitly consumerist, directly relating to a capitalist structure, and arising from a scientific ideology. Maybe this is what gives older household items their benignity?... Also, what are the implications when a fairy tale is recast into a modern setting w/modern technology?
To rewind a little to the earlier topic:
I think the danger w/ascribing archetypal traits to objects is that it becomes very easy to justify hegomonic ideas by mapping them onto biology (ie. it's nature therefore it's the way things should be and always have been). I think the idea of the archetype has been abused in this way, esp in terms of gendering symbols and coding women as passive, irrational etc.
On the other hand, if archetypes are solely cultural and conscious constructions, where do they derive their symbolic power?.... How can objects, images or symbols that are no longer significant or even present in modern day society still hold symbolic power? Can you never tire of a story, no matter how many times you yourself change in your own life?
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isthmus
nekoi
Registered User
(11/6/02 3:54:22 pm)
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individual & system
to go off on a tangent from your post, Judith, I like reworkings of fairy tales when they are coming from a modern perspective b/c they often have that personal perspective (enviro in relation to protag), and at the same time, they hold the proportions and relations of the systems that have been worked through over and over... the results are *very* interesting.
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(11/6/02 7:34:58 pm)
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the persistence of symbols
> On the other hand, if archetypes are solely cultural and conscious constructions, where do they derive their symbolic power?.... How can objects, images or symbols that are no longer significant or even present in modern day society still hold symbolic power? Can you never tire of a story, no matter how many times you yourself change in your own life?
JB: I see no reason why such constructions would have to be held in conscious awareness to wield symbolic power.
This question reminds me of an article (published? unpublished?) that I haven't thought of in a long time. It was derived from a 1980s University of Michigan psych dissertation, some form of structural analysis of psychotherapeutic narratives obtained in clinical interviews. Interesting observations, but the author, Gary Gregg, didn't apparently see what to me was jumping up and down and waving its arms in his fascinating material. One of the narratives, for example, was from a woman with some kind of uterine bleeding that never stopped. A central figure was a male doctor who cured her, whom she saw as shining, blond and "pure"... The stories were full of fairytale and Grail-legend and mythic imagery, all blood and darkness and mystical power. It made me wonder to what degree our deep experience of the world still happens in these terms, with this kind of imagery and symbolism. I'm convinced that something like this is why I write fantasy.
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(11/6/02 7:57:01 pm)
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domestic emergence
> The idea of the comb/spindle colonizing the external world is interesting--but I am wondering if that is what they do? Those objects seem less to subject the external world (here the fantastic world of the forest) than to be colonized by it--and to act not in accordance with the domestic "home" world use, but the newly invented bestowed fantastic function--creating a paradox--the spoon at home and the spoon in its fantastic configuration--out there in the fantastic.
JB: I wrote with less than fully formed ideas... Colonization isn't the best word, and I'm not sure what is. What I was thinking about was the transformation of domestic objects into fantastic, magically powerful ones and the way that, through the magical comb, etc.,, the ordinary intrudes into (mixes with?) the extraordinary. It's a sort of parallel to the movement, physical or otherwise, of the heroine from her initial circumstances into a place where magical things can happen.
And I was thinking about the way a homicidal toaster is in a way an inversion of a magical spoon. Bradbury's toaster (I remember it as a toaster) is the extraordinary intruding into the ordinary. The hero doesn't leave home and travel to an ogre's castle, the ogre shows up on the front door and moves in. The ogre turns out to have been there all along.
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Laura
McCaffrey
Registered User
(11/7/02 4:46:00 pm)
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when a spoon is just a spoon
To all,
I am really enjoying this thread.
Midori wrote:
However, it is how the images of the ordinary are patterned, manipulated in the story that suggests their symbolic importance--a spoon can be just a spoon--but when it becomes a key ingredient in a repeated act, or when it is paralleled to a series of domestic objects that perform a series of fantastic events, then the ordinary object becomes significant, highlighted. SNIP
I particularly like this idea Midori, because it leaves room for the "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" concept. While objects have symbolic meaning, they don't always have to have symbolic meaning within the context of a story. Literalism has a place within storytelling. Sometimes I get frustrated with literary criticism because it seems to leave so little room for literalism, the teller's or author's intention being literal or mundane.
Laura Mc
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Gregor9
Registered User
(11/8/02 8:00:41 am)
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So much to think about
Midori wrote: in part because I find it difficult to compare our modern anxiety about technology (think of Blade Runner--or almost any story by P.K.Dick and William Gibson)
I'm reading a book at the moment (for review) that deals with aspects of fetishism and, in part the failure of traditional theory (Freud) to address these aspect. The author makes the point that in cyberfiction, the technological aspects of jacking in to a matrix, a cyberspace, is an inversion of the sexual roles, the male protagonists being feminized by the process of being plugged into. There's a good deal more there, but you have me wondering now if some of the anxiety about techology as such is a result of the shaking up of sexual roles, if the technology here is pushing boundaries which, while unrecognized consciously, might cause a low-level anxiety as a result. Hope that makes sense. This is a complex pretzel, and I have to go away and think about it.
But in another direction--the comb, the mirror, etc. were once upon a time technological wonders, too. So would it be fair to say that the use of the technology of the comb in oral/fairy tale tradition is analagous to the use of technology--the matrix/cyberspace/computer, the "thinking" home--in contemporary sf and fantasy? Both seem to me to be grounded as "real world" elements and as magical items, albeit that most of the time the contemporary technology is moving into the realm of the horror story--that is, as Judith outlines with the toaster, etc.--fiction of violation and intrusion, the magical realm ripping open a hole in day-to-day life.
Greg (going off to let his synapses burn with these thoughts awhile)
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cpe
Unregistered User
(11/8/02 10:01:07 pm)
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was wonderng
Hi, I just was wondering, Are you the Judith Berman who wrote that great book on the Holocaust?
all best
cpe
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