Since contemporary storytellers haven’t inherited a living body of oral literature, we’ve had to improvise both the customs and content of the art form, reinventing storytelling as a new artistic vocation.
Each storyteller finds his or her own repertoire, and the voice to convey it. I have heard the French troubadour Bruno de la Salle tell the Arthurian epic of the Grail all night long on the steps of Chartres Cathedral. I have listened to Alice Kane tell Irish wonder tales to five hundred listeners in a tent at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. I have watched African-American teller Brother Blue dance his stories barefoot on the sidewalk, burning with a passion to change the world through his bebop narratives. I have listened to the Metis storyteller Ron Evans recounting the true story of Marie d’Orleans, a Native woman who escaped with her young sons from the devastation of an enemy attack, and taught these little boys to survive in the snow-covered mountains while she, starving and frost-bitten, trekked out of the Rockies to find help. The storyteller wept as he told of her extraordinary courage and love, and I wept with him. I have heard Tagish mythteller Angela Sidney tell how Crow made the world, as a crow hopped past us on the grass beside the Yukon River.
I’ve also delighted in the story my youngest child tells about catching his first bass, and the stories my father-in-law tells about his adventures as a Canadian Mountie, and the anecdotes that get traded back and forth by travellers on long flights. I love to hear about how your grandfather survived the war, or how your parents met on a blind date, or how you once had a dream that came true. Storytelling is an art that lies close to everyday life. We practise it every time we gather at the coffee machine at work, or put our kids to bed with a made-up yarn. You can hear the art in every schoolyard when a kid retells last night’s television show or runs a verbal replay of a winning overtime goal. We refold time and space through our stories, keeping a personal oral heritage alive through daily reimagining and conversation.
But what is it that holds us so rapt when stories are told? What are we listening for in the storyteller’s words?
My partner was once putting our first-born child to bed. He was about three years old, and he liked to postpone sleep for as long as possible (this hasn’t changed much now that he’s a teenager). In a monotonous murmur she began to tell him the most soporific yarn she could make up. It was a very, very, very, very repetitive story about how all the animals in the barnyard were going to sleep: “Once upon a time it was bedtime in the barnyard and the piggies were getting sleepy… and the ducklings were getting sleepy… and the ponies were getting sleepy… and the little chicks were getting sleepy….” Our son had almost succumbed to its sleep-inducing spell when he managed to rouse himself from his pillow and interject: “Then suddenly they heard footsteps!” The story picked up from there, and he sat up to listen.
Even at three he knew that something was missing from his mother’s stream of words. The story-part wasn’t there, that moment of transformation that leaves everything different in the imaginary world of the tale.
My Romanian grandmother used to begin her fairy tales with a traditional opening: “Once something happened. If it hadn’t happened, how I could tell you about it?” Our son sensed that there didn’t seem to be a “something” about to happen at the heart of the story. Without this moment of change and revelation, the words remain only a dull sequence of talk.
An Armenian saying distinguishes between listening to a story’s language and understanding what it has to say: Three apples fell from heaven—one for the storyteller, one for the listener, and one for the one who heard. I once heard the American storyteller Donald Davis explain to an audience in Montreal, “As a storyteller, I only give you the words. It’s how you hear those words that turns them into a story.” This is listening with a mind to remember, where listeners know that one day they may pass the tale on in their turn. The story speaks to you, in other words, only when you are willing to lend it your own voice. Our threeyear-old was ready to both listen and hear; it was just that the teller’s apple hadn’t dropped all the way.
My favourite literary example of the power of spokenaloud stories comes from J. D. Salinger’s short story “The Laughing Man.” Every afternoon, a gifted camp counsellor tells his tribe of high-spirited nine-year-old New York boys—the “Comanches”—a new chapter in the continuing saga of a hideously deformed, miraculously good-hearted criminal mastermind known as “the Laughing Man.” The story infiltrates and guides the lives of these boys. It becomes their escort. The Comanches hear the Laughing Man’s brilliantly heroic footsteps on the streets of New York, and it changes their lives are changed forever.
The storyteller’s mission is to remind his listeners, young or old, that those footsteps aren’t just coming towards a fictional barnful of somnolent animals. They may also be stepping towards us. Stories reflect our own possibilities for transformation. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a skeptical rider doubts the existence of hobbits—“‘Halflings,’” laughed the rider… ‘Halflings! But they are only a little people in old songs and children’s tales out of the North. Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?’” and Aragorn replies, “‘A man may do both… for not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day.’” The purpose of oral stories is to help us remember that life on our green earth is lived by daylight and by story-light. That is why even the most skeptical listen with open hearts when the storyteller begins. Storytropic, we’re drawn to narrative as naturally as sunflowers opening to the light.
On a recent visit to Toronto’s exquisite Textile Museum of Canada, I found myself playing with a heddle. I read that this simple device was one of the greatest innovations in the history of weaving. By passing the warp threads through heddles and fixing a series of heddles to a single bar, the weaver was able to create far more complex patterns than if each thread was individually pulled through the weft. It occurred to me that oral stories work in much the same way. In a told story, the weft of lifeexperience is entwined with the warp thread of imagination. Like a heddle, stories allow us to bring warp and weft together in a way that creates variation, colour, texture and design. Thus the woven material, whether of words or yarn, becomes a pattern complex enough to reflect life itself.
I was once walking with my boys along the esplanade at Niagara Falls. I’d promised that we’d have lunch out. We’d been walking for an hour when I realized I’d left my wallet back at the hotel. We were a mile and a half along the promenade by the river, it was hot and dusty, there were ten thousand tourists around us, and it was definitely time for lunch. Three-year-old Jacob had slowed from a fitful trudge to a reluctant scuffle, seven-year-old Nathaniel was frantic with hunger and recrimination. Truth to tell, I wasn’t feeling all that inspired myself. I broke the news: no, we couldn’t have lunch because I didn’t have any money; yes, I know I’d promised; yes, of course I knew it was lunchtime; no, we couldn’t take a cab or bus or subway back to the hotel; yes, I knew it was too far to walk; yes; no; whatever. We were a grim little band as we turned around and started slouching back the way we’d come.
“You guys want to play Twenty Questions? Come on, come on, keep walking!”
“No.”
“Do you want to look for cars from Ohio?”
“Ohio’s dumb.”
“Do you want to hear a story?”
“Okay,” from the little one, the older abstaining, though circling within earshot.
“A long story or a short story?”
“Long.”
Mindful of the Gaelic saying that “storytelling is the shortening of the road,” and knowing there was a godawful amount of road to shorten, I started telling them one of the longest stories I know: “Once upon a time there was a poor woodcutter, and his name was Ali Baba…”
Three things happened at that moment.
My you
nger son took my right hand in his left hand, where it stayed for the entire walk.
Our pace picked up considerably.
Niagara Falls disappeared.
Tourists, traffic, heat, hunger, sore feet, dust, kvetching: gone. One of the wonders of the natural world: gone. Instead, we were standing in front of a mighty rock. Forty robbers had been and gone, leaving their loot inside the hill, and galloping off again. Perching in a tree, we overheard the magic spell they used: two ordinary words that could open a mountain.
Now we’re standing here alone, about to unlock our destiny with those same two words of power. We murmur them to the hillside: “Open Sesame.” A passageway appears. We enter, step carefully into the darkness. A cool, dimly lit cave, illumined by the cracks in the vaulted roof. We behold what Allah has granted into our possession. Gold gleams in countless sacks that fill the cave. Diamonds shine on the floor, emerald bracelets crunch underfoot as we enter the cave, going where no woodcutter has ever gone before. This hoard of riches, accumulated by what must have been generations of thieves, belongs to us now. Knowing the secret of the cave, we have become the masters of the treasure—that is, if the robbers don’t find us and cut our throats first.
We were no longer a bedraggled trio but a band of intrepid heroes setting forth with newfound spirit to the cadence of a seven-hundred-year-old wonder tale. It was an irresistible world that called to us, a world of gold and danger, where treasure could be both hidden and found, where everyday words could be charged with rock-splitting power, where great courage was needed to conquer great evil. In this story-world made only of words, you certainly don’t drag your feet, even if you’re only three years old and tireder than you’ve ever been. Pride, alertness, bravery, high spirits—these are the qualities you live by in such a world. “Listen your way in / with your mouth,” wrote the great Jewish poet Paul Celan. Or with your feet, I thought as we marched towards the hotel restaurant, and your hands, as I found I was still holding my little boy’s hand. You have to bring all of yourself to the story if that story is going to carry you in turn.
The hour-long walk sped by and we ended the tale at the table. Marjanah did her famous Dagger Dance. The men—Ali Baba, his son, and the robber chief disguised as a family friend—were entranced by her grace and beauty. Then she took her emerald-hilted dagger and stabbed the false Hassan straight through the heart. He fell, as the story says, dead “among the carpets.” Marjanah and Ali Baba and the son (whom she married, of course) lived in great wealth and peace for many years until they, too, were visited by the one who cuts down mighty kings and humble peasants, the one who waits at the end of all our journeys. Only when the story was over did we order lunch.
So why are storytellers returning to twenty-first century life? That reminds me of a story passed on by the theologian Martin Buber in his Tales of the Hasidim. This one is told about Moshe Leib, a student of the student of the great Jewish rabbi, the Baal Shem Tov:
The rabbi of Rizhyn related:
“Once when the holy Baal Shem Tov wanted to save the life of a sick boy he was very much attached to, he ordered a candle made of pure wax, carried it to the woods, fastened it to a tree, and lit it. Then he pronounced a long prayer. The candle burned all night. When morning came, the boy was well.
“When my grandfather, the Great Maggid, who was the holy Baal Shem’s disciple, wanted to work a like cure, he no longer knew the secret meaning of the words on which he had to concentrate. He did as his master had done and called on his name. And his efforts met with success.
“When Rabbi Moshe Leib, the disciple of the disciple of the Great Maggid, wanted to work a cure of this kind, he said, ‘We have no longer the power even to do what was done. But I shall relate the story of how it was done, and God will help.’ And his efforts met with success.”
But what do we do if we hear the cry of the sick child—that eternal human need for intimacy, community, a connection with the sacred—in an age when the story-fire is almost extinguished, when news replaces narrative, and broadcast voices jam the living tongue’s frequency; when screenglow replaces hearth-fire, and data replace wisdom? At such a time, which is our time, it isn’t enough to remember the story of the Baal Shem Tov’s prayer. We must rediscover the very form of storytelling, and through that begin to find the stories that will mend the world. The story, for me, continues:
Time passed, and generation followed generation. The world entered a time of forgetfulness, a time when the link to the past was broken and the future seemed unreal. The child’s cry for help was almost impossible to hear in that violent, amnesiac world. Yet some people heard it, and wanted more than anything to offer succour to that sick and frightened soul. But they did not know what to do. They hadn’t heard of the Baal Shem’s prayer, or the forest, the tree, the trail, the candle of purest wax. They didn’t even remember how to pray. Everything had been lost. The only thing that remained was a distant memory of a good man who had once upon a time told stories to comfort a lonely child. And so they tried to become storytellers.
We do not yet know if this will be enough. I do know that, fired with the age-old desire to heal a world beset by loneliness, the storytellers are on the move again. They have come back to serve as the earth’s storytellers in residence. They have heard the footsteps of a new story coming over the horizon, and want more than anything to give it voice.
FRANKIE AND THE FIREBIRD
I think the mood of a story that is told to children should be one of kindliness.
PADRAIC COLUM, “Storytelling New and Old”
FRANKIE WAS NOT A GOOD LISTENER. In fact, he may have been the worst listener in the world, a dragon in the shape of an eight-year-old boy. I’m glad that I met him in 1972, the summer that I entered the Muse’s service. Frankie taught me the most important secret of storytelling. Here’s how it happened.
I was working as a counsellor at Bolton Camp, a camp for kids from the poorest neighbourhoods in Toronto. That spring, I’d finally graduated from university. I tried a few jobs, but nothing stuck. I noticed Bolton Camp was looking for a replacement counsellor after the summer season had already started. When I drove up to camp to report for duty, I found out the other counsellor had run away. A particularly rambunctious cabinful of eight eight-year-old boys had driven him crazy. I was his replacement.
As I did a walkabout with the camp director we passed a boy sitting on a hillock chucking rocks at the passersby. “Frankie!” shouted the director, “Stop that right now—you might hurt somebody!” He whispered to me, “Frankie’s got some problems with anger management. He’s in your cabin.” Further along we encountered young Mario. He was weeping at operatic pitch as he sat on the ground nursing a bruised knee. “Mario, this is Dan. He’ll be your new counsellor.” More tears. Later I met my two Davids. One was an Ojibway boy, a great naturalist who liked to spend his time down by the creek or off in the woods. He liked to find things and bring them back to show his counsellor, often at mealtime. “Where’ve you been?” I’d ask, as he sat next to me at the table.
“Creek.” He never said more than necessary.
“Find anything?”
“Yep.”
“Want to show me after lunch?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll bet you want to show me now?”
“Yep.” Then he’d dig deep into his grubby pocket and haul out half a frog, explaining that the snake in the water was busy digesting the other half.
The other David was a sad, strange child. He’d had his birthday just before I came to camp, but apparently something had happened, something unnameable and bad, which involved his trunk and which nobody was prepared to tell me about. He never opened his trunk, and there was an odd smell at his end of the cabin. This melancholy boy seemed haunted by his own private ghost.
Bolton Camp, of course, had a resident ghost. I’ve since learned that all summer camps are haunted. The ghosts go by different names: Sulphur Man, Bloody Mary, Three-fingered Willy (you don’t r
eally want to know how he got that name). Ours was known, simply, as Old Man Bolton. I heard the whole story the day after I arrived, when we had a campfire a couple of hundred metres up the hill from the last cabin. The campfire began with songs. The kids, who’d come from pretty rough backgrounds, loved to sing about the Titanic, that great ship of doom:
Oh, they built the ship Titanic
To sail the ocean blue
And they thought they had a ship
The water couldn’t go through,
But the good Lord raised his hand
Said, ‘This ship will never land,’
It was sad when the great ship went down.
It was sad
—So sad!
It was sad
—Too bad!
It was sad when the great ship went down
—To the bottom of the
Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives
It was sad when the great ship went down
Kerplunk
—It sunk
What a lousy piece of junk
—’Cause the captain was drunk
Glug, glug, glug…
When I looked around at my boys singing merrily about the drowning children, women, men and crew of the mighty and indestructible Titanic, it occurred to me they’d spent most of their young lives staring helplessly at the various icebergs approaching their own frail vessels.
After the songs were done, the counsellor took a long moment to fix the fire, placing a branch here, a log there. Then he stood quietly and gazed out over our heads to the trees that circled the clearing. Finally, he looked around the boys and said, “Ever heard of Old Man Bolton?”
Nervous laughter from these first-time campers.
“Well, they say he used to live around here. All of this land once belonged to him.”
The boys peered out into the dark forest.
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