A bad storyteller

At the end of a tale in one of my notebooks from Co. Clare I wrote: “30 December 1929. This is the worst told tale I have ever heard, and to one familiar with the story the omissions, hesitations and inconsistencies were exasperating. The audience was quite disgusted.

Now and then I would catch the eye of John Carey, a good story-teller, who was sitting beside the fire smoking, and he would shake his head sadly. To him it was sacrilege to mishandle a story so. The unfortunate reciter, who was really doing his best, used to cough at times – he had a cold, but it suited him to cloak his deficiencies with a loud cough now and then, and the resting place in the narration thus created allowed him to think. Very often, storytellers cough when they are not sure what they are going to say!

Finally, old Carey could stand the strain no longer, being outraged beyond endurance, and he shouted at the story-teller telling him what he had omitted and admonishing him! Carey and the other listeners had known the reciter’s father, who was the best story-teller in the district; the son remembered the tales, but could not tell them properly.

The illiterate literary critic can be as merciless in his judgement as his sophisticated colleague writing in a room full of books, and we can be assured that medieval as well as modern oral narrative had to pass through the purgatorial fire of many centuries before reaching the high standard required of it by the cynical critics of the Gaelic-spaking world.

Seamus O Duilearga [James Delargy] “Irish Tales and Story-tellers”, in H. Khun and K.Schier (eds.), Märchen, Mythos und Dichtung: Festschrift zum 90. Geburtstag Friedrich von der Leyens am 19. August 1963, Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1963, pp. 66-67

Illustration inspired by the drawing of a shaman’s drum

The strange expression of her eyes

The kapala’s [headman] daughter and a female companion demanded two florins each for telling folklore, whereupon I expressed a wish first to hear what they were able to tell. The companion insisted on the money first, but the kapala’s wife, who was a very nice woman, began to sing, her friend frequently joining in the song. This was the initial prayer, without which there could be no story-telling. She was a blian [shamaness], and her way of relating legends was to delineate stories in song form, she informed me.

As there was nobody to interpret I was reluctantly compelled to dispense with her demonstration, although I had found it interesting to watch the strange expression of her eyes as she sang and the trance-like appearance she maintained. Another noticeable fact was the intense attachment of her dogs, which centred their eyes constantly upon her and accompanied her movement with strange guttural sounds.

Dayak, central Borneo, Carl Lumholtz, Through Central Borneo: An Account of Two Years’ Travel in the Land of the Head-Hunters Between the Years 1913 and 1917, Singapore: Oxford University Press, pp. 137-138

Illustration inspired by a rock art painting of Kimberley, Australia

I never heard him tell the same story twice

Here in our cell, we men gathered every night surrounded by candles and burners, sitting in a circle as we did when we stopped for a snack during work. Here we kept weaving, laughing and without cares, listening to the tales of the storytellers. I have never heard so many stories as I did while on prison, and I even remember them to this day, some of them.

[…]

At night, the cell looked like a wedding, full of candles and kerosene burners. Thus, weaving and weaving, we told each other stories until the small hours. In that story business, Matico Quispe was special. He was a prisoner from the village of Oropesa, and his wife was from Huaro, where he lived. Here, when he was working gathering corn at the estate of a certain Mr. Díaz three sacks of corn-seed disappeared. He was innocent, but the landowner didn’t believe him.

Rather, he reported him at Urcos, where his brother-in-law was a judge, as the thief who had stolen his seed. That’s why Matico was in prison. Matico was special, since from that time at the Urcos prison until today I’ve never found such a storyteller as Matico. He was such a teller of tales that during the time I was in prison I never heard him tell the same story twice. Everything was ready in his head.

Gregorio Condori Mamani, De nosotros los Runas: Autobiografía, with Ricardo Valderrama Fernández and Carmen Escalante Gutiérrez, Madrid: Alfaguara: 1983, pp. 49, 52; Gregorio Condori Mamani is a Quechua native from the village of Acopía, in Peru

Illustration inspired by an image of Buddhist tradition

Story-tellers

Though the Japanese are a nation of readers, they love also to listen to the tales of the professional story-teller, who is quite an artist in his way. The lower sort of story-teller may be seen seated at the street-corner, with a circle of gaping coolies round him. The higher class form guilds who own special houses of entertainment called yose, and may also be engaged by the hour to amuse private parties. Some story-telling is rather in the nature of a penny-reading. The man sits with an open book before him and expounds it, – the story of the Forty-seven Rōnins, perhaps, or the Chinese novel of the “Three Kingdoms” (Songoku Shi), or an account of the Satsuma rebellion, or the old wars of the Taira and the Minamoto families in the Middle Ages; – and when he comes to some particularly good point, he emphasises it by a rap with his fan or with a little slab of wood kept by him for this purpose. Such a reading is called gundan if the subject be war; otherwise it is kōshaku, which means literally a “disquisition.” The hanashi-ka or story-teller proper, deals in love-tales, anecdotes, and imaginary incidents. The Gidaiyu is a sort of ballad sung by women to the accompaniment of the shamisen or banjo.

The entertainment offered at a yose is generally mixed. There will be war-stories, love-tales, recitations to the accompaniment of the banjo, the same programme being mostly adhered to for a fortnight, and a change being made on the 1st and the 16th of the month. As the number of such houses in every large city is considerable, hearers may nevertheless find something new every night to listen to, and the higher class of story-tellers themselves may realise what for Japan is a very fair income. For they drive about from one house of entertainment to another, stopping only a quarter of an hour or so at each, – just time to tell one story and earn a dollar or two by it.

Many foreign students of the Japanese language have found the yose their best school; but only two have hitherto thought of going there, not as listeners, but as performers. One is an Englishman named Black, whose command of Japanese is so perfect, and whose plots borrowed from the stores of European fiction prove such agreeable novelties, that the Tokyo story-tellers have admitted him to their guild. The other – also an Englishman, of the name John Pale – is said to sing Japanese songs as well as any native.

With the introduction of European amusements, such as dancing and the cinema, the yose has somewhat lost ground in popular favour. By curious turn of fate, however, it has come under the special patronage of the Government, by whom it is now used for the purposes of propaganda; – Black, the clever Englishman abovementioned, died in 1923.

Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese being Notes on Various Subjects connected with Japan, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1939, p. 467

Illustration inspired on engravings from a cave in the island of Götland

But we did not go to sleep

I knew all about Coyote and the things he can do, because my father told us the stories about how the world began and how Coyote helped our Creator, Elder Brother, to set things in order. Only some men know these stories, but my father was one of them. On winter nights, when we had finished our gruel or rabbit stew and lay back on our mats, my brothers would say to him. “My father, tell us something.”

My father would lie quietly upon his mat with my mother beside him and the baby between them. At last he would start slowly to tell us about how the world began. This is a story that can be told only in winter when there are not snakes about, for if the snakes heard they would crawl in and bite you. But in winter when snakes are asleep, we tell these things. Our story about the world is full of songs, and when the neighbors heard my father singing they would open our door and step in over the high threshold. Family by family they came, and we made a big fire and kept the door shut against the cold night. When my father finished a sentence we would all say the last word after him. if anyone went to sleep he would stop. He would not speak any more. But we did not go to sleep.

R. M. Underhill, Papago Woman, Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland Press, p. 50

Illustration inspired by the art of the people Klickitat the northwest coast of America

Tales to daylight

In my native place, Pool Ewe, Ross shire, when I was a boy, it was the custom for the young to assemble together on the long winter nights to hear the old people recite the tales or sgeulachd, which they had learned from their fathers before them. In these days tailors and shoemakers went from house to house, making our clothes and shoes. When one of them came to the village we were greatly delighted, whilst getting new kilts at the same time.

I knew an old tailor who used to tell a new tale every night during his stay in the village; and another, an old shoemaker, who, with his large stock of stories about ghosts and fairies, used to frighten us so much that we scarcely dared pass the neighbouring churchyard on our way home.

It was also the custom when an aoidh, or stranger, celebrated for his store of tales, came on a visit to the village, for us, young and old, to make a rush to the house where he passed the night, and choose our seats, some on beds, some on forms, and others on three legged stools, etc., and listen in silence to the new tales; just as I have myself seen since, when a far famed actor came to perform in the Glasgow theatre. The goodman of the house usually opened with the tale of Famhair Mor (great giant) or some other favourite tale, and then the stranger carried on after that. It was a common saying, ‘The first tale by the goodman, and tales to daylight by the aoidh,’ or guest. It was also the custom to put riddles, in the solving of which all in the house had to tax their ingenuity. If one of the party put a riddle which was not solved that night, he went home with the title of King of Riddles.

Besides this, there was usually in such gatherings a discussion about the Fein, which comes from Fiantaidh, giant; the Fiantaidh were a body of men who volunteered to defend their country from the invasions and inroads of the Danes and Norwegians, or Lochlinnich. Fiunn, who was always called King of the Fein, was the strongest man amongst them, and no person was admitted into the company who was less in height than he, however much taller. I remember the old black shoemaker telling us one night that Fiunn had a tooth which he consulted as an oracle upon all important occasions. He had but to touch this tooth, and whatever he wanted to know was at once revealed to him.

From a letter by Hector Urquhart to John Francis Campbell, dated March 1860; John Francis Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1860, vol. I, págs. vi-vii

Illustration inspired by a japanese netsuke

A process of continual fictionalization

Our social and personal lives are a process of continual fictionalization, as we internalize the other-we-are-not, dramatize them, imagine them, speak for them and through them. The accuracy of this fictionalization is never guaranteed, but without an ability to at least guess at what the other might be thinking, we could have no social lives at all. One of the things fiction did is make this process explicit—visible. All storytelling is the invitation to enter a parallel space, a hypothetical arena, in which you have imagined access to whatever is not you. And if fiction had a belief about itself, it was that fiction had empathy in its DNA, that it was the product of compassion.

Zadie Smith, “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction”, New York Review of Books, October 24 2019, p. 8

Illustration based on a Haida amulet (great blue heron and human), kept in the Royal British Columbia Museum

An inheritance from the deep past

This is what we’ve inherited from the deep past, […] the innate ability to tell and understand stories, which came from our interactions with a demanding natural environment; and the neural programs that enable us to read and write, which also came from that environment.

Margaret Atwood, “Literature and the environment” in Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004-2021, London:  Chatto & Windus, 2022, p. 145

Illustration inspired by the drawing of a South African fabric

The subject is recitation

[In the Kalevala] all objects and creatures are part of a vital continuum in constant mutual communication. It is a world never silent. It seems almost to be kept alive by the noise. Inanimate objects vibrate with a sort of pantheistic tremor. The walls and floors and roofbeams of the house rattle and creak and sing in anticipation of the bride who will come. Nothing stands still; even the dead are not dead, merely elsewhere. All this sound and movement was originally conveyed, of course, by an uninterrupted chanting voice; the sonic descriptions must have provided perfect opportunities to rouse the auditors to stay focused on the narrative winding thread. Recitation was not only the medium of the Kalevala poems, it was their abiding subject. The words and the music that accompanied them embody supreme magic.

Geoffrey O’Brien, “Magic Sayings by the Thousands”, New York Review of Books, November 4, 2021, p. 36

Illustration inspired by the logo of the Kalevala Society

‘Squeeze’ is our slang for ‘tell’

“Listen,” he said, “if you’re an American, you must have seen lots of movies, yes? Read a lot of books? Read novels a lot?” 

I nodded again. 

“Good. I think we may be able to have a good business relationship.” 

The parkhan [boss] grinned widely at my bewilderment. Then his mood shifted and he became very serious and intense, peering at me directily with only a hint of a mocking smile around his dark eyes. […] 

“Now listen,” he said seriously. “Can you squeeze a novel?” 

I said, “What do you mean, ‘squeeze’?” 

He said, “You know, ‘squeeze’ is our slang for ‘tell.’ Can you tell us novels, narrate the stories, same with movies? We have no storyteller here, and we need stories. Life is empty without a good story to keep you going every day. Can you do that?” 

Alexander Dolgun and Patrick Watson, Alexander Dolgun’s Story: An American in the Gulag. New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1974, pp. 141-142 

Illustration inspired by a traditional drawing