Storytelling in the Digital Age

W. Penn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781137365286
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137365293
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Through a professional story-teller's sometimes humorous commentary on culture and literature from The Odyssey on , the book suggests that literature is not an artifact to be studied but a living process. Often irreverent, crossing literary and scholarly lines, Penn aims to discover what literature does for an imaginatively engaged reader.

C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N

The Life of Swans

If we are to keep ourselves to ourselves, besides first needing to develop a self, that self has to be rational, realistic, and understand truth and beauty in a context larger than the individual. Odysseus hid his identity from all he encountered until he knew where he was, who he was with, and how he needed to be and then he did not alter his identity (you can’t), but allowed Athena to numinously reveal it in such a way that his host was either pleased or the danger had been escaped. The thrower-away wears the masks of social acceptability and does a job that would horrify or alarm most people, even those who recognize the landfills of bureaucracy that threaten us and our environments.

If we were to keep ourselves.

Instead of learning from literature, from the truth and beauty that comes from participatorily reading literature, we’ve gone the other way. Instead of keeping our contexts broad and wide, we have crept ever closer to revealing ourselves as individuals as though those revelations matter or as though anyone who “has a life” should care, instead of only other self-absorbed people caring—and not about you, but about besting you in their own revelations, forcing you to care equally or more about them. It all creates a kind of white noise of indifference, or surface caring from uncaring people, not unlike the need for bad students to ask, “How’d you do?” on an examination hoping that you will admit to possibly doing worse or at least sympathize about the difficulty of the exam—especially because neither of you studied for it—and avoiding the hidden truth that had one learned the material as one went along, all along, there’d be no need to “study” but only a need to swiftly go back over the material in your mind, organizing, connecting, finding contexts.

Fiction, literary fiction that is truer than fact (go ahead and debate facts with Quarky String Theorists), especially when realistic, allows us to live for a while in the context created by a writer. If we do not read it as something separate from us or foolishly cling to our “facts” and false truths, we are allowed the privilege of acquiring the wisdom of experience without having to endure the (f)actual experiences themselves, shaping our lives with what we know and what more we may come to know. Factual people and people who claim their own limited experience as the foundation for “truth” remind me of the Air Force captain who 30 years ago lost a week’s pay to me playing Nine Ball whose “rules” for pool were erroneous, but which he claimed were true based on the fact that he “had shot pool all over the world,” to which the only available response was, “Well, then you’ve shot pool all over the world wrong(ly).”

We don’t have to read a lot—it isn’t a contest or an Evelyn Wood Speed Reading test—though we ought to read every day for all our days. We do have to read more slowly, carefully, and pay attention to the words, and if we do we may get a lot from a very short story. Again, Graham Greene’s, “The Blue Film.” From it, we may learn that people who are unhappy and discontented often want to make us pay attention to their discontent, or perhaps want to “have” exterior “experiences” to rectify the things they lack or have missed. In “The Blue Film” we have a discontented wife with a husband who has traveled too much, left her alone at home too much, and who has decided to take her along with him on a trip to the East,

He thought of the money he had spent to take his wife with him and to ease his conscience—he had been away too often without her, but there is no company more cheerless than that of a woman who is not desired. (p. 26)

If you begrudge the money spent, you probably are not in love with the person on whom it is spent, for few humans would not spend way too much in the throes of love, and happily.

But our narrator—and Greene very carefully makes this passive in voice, though still from the husband’s point of view—sees that his wife, whose neck reminds him how difficult it is to unstring a turkey, has “reached an age when the satisfied woman is at her most beautiful, but the lines of discontent had formed.” He wonders if it is his fault, or hers, or some inherited, genetic characteristic. And then comes the passive voice: “It was sad how when one was young, one so often mistook the signs of frigidity for a kind of distinction.” Not “he was sad” but “It was sad.” A generalization that holds true, and for which substitutions may be made—for example, when one is young, one so often mistakes cool fashion for merited confidence, or pert energy for vitality of character.

From this story, husbands (and people with enough imagination to reverse the genders and perhaps modify the situations) should learn, if they haven’t already, that when a wife complains, “Other people enjoy themselves,” trouble is brewing. Whether or not the complaint is realistic, we have to judge. But when our answer is a weak, “Well, . . . we’ve seen . . . ,” we know we have a man who is trying to show his wife a time, even a good time, but something is missing—and the missing is never for just the one, but always for the two of them. If the wife interrupts, “The reclining Buddha, the emerald Buddha, the floating markets . . . We have dinner and then go home to bed,” we understand that it is the habitual pattern of married life that she is complaining about, a habitual pattern that has replaced sexual activity, tension, and attraction with complacent sexlessness, one that he would diverge from if he were without her. While there is much to be said for habits and routines—they provide structure, organization, and the efficiencies of knowing where our car keys are—there is much less to be said for habits that derive from dissatisfaction or lost attraction, or realization that one mistook frigidity for something else and that his or her marriage is a loveless sexless one.

This story is about sex and sensuality, a region of intercourse in which both men and women in the middle of the journey of their lives so often come to themselves in a dark wood. Married couples often fail in their youthfulness or their postprandial rediscovery of what they think are their desserts to make choices based on literary experience and wisdom, measuring the other by need; many of these time-bomb needs lurk unknown, the genetically predisposed fences unseen and denied, like blindered horses at a steeplechase seeing only the jump right in front of us and not the entire demanding course. They usually blame the other person—and blame involves judgment, right or wrong—and only the wisest understand that the outcome may well have been predicted in the initial choice and that the choice was unwise. Or before they turn on the other person—as they start their turning—they turn outward, seeking to make up for all their roads not taken by trying to go back and choose a different road, to overcome their frigidity (in this story) with implacable attempts at sensuality.

It is absolutely vital that Greene never lets the husband lose sight of his own middle age, his own loss of sexual attractiveness along with a sexual attraction that was not and remains not there. He is never arrogant nor self-complacent, just increasingly sad. Though we are offered a chance to understand that love (like everything else) is a continuous activity and feeling, the sad truth of this story is that the people never ought to have married at all, combined with the complexity and balance of narration that allows us a personal and an objective understanding—rarely in life is someone else to blame for what makes us happy or unhappy. She accuses him of being “conventional,” and in many ways he probably is: he is her husband, he travels a lot for business, and he has grown to be middle-aged, physically. She also accusingly says to him that were she not with a husband, she “should be taken to plenty of Spots,” which suggests that she does not have a very clear picture of herself. It is unlikely that anyone would take her to “spots” short of her becoming an extremely wealthy widow.

It seems to me that we might say that a middle-aged man who seeks ever-younger sexual partners or even partakes of prostitution is sad, too, someone seeking the tumescence of character in the very temporary and sordid falsities. No one believes that the empty made-up Barbie on the arm of a Republican real estate magnate actually likes, loves, or even enjoys him and his company, would enjoy him or his company if he was not exceptionally wealthy and by means of his wealth, powerful. No one sees it, however, as the power of the powerless, the tumescence of the emasculated, though that is what it is.

The same might be said of a woman who wants—a quarter century into her marriage—to go to “spots,” and yet when she gets there, sees the spots as dirtily, disgustingly erotic and when a young man appearing in a “Blue Film”—produced 30 years ago—turns out to have been her husband, she finds it “disgusting,” wonders how he could be so degrading, and especially wonders if he has not worried that someone else in business would see the film and recognize him. How if she had known, she’d never have married him. The bitter irony is piquant: had he recognized that she was frigid and not distinguished, he’d not have married her; she is the discontented one who wanted titillation by going to “spots”—smoking opium, strip clubs, blue films—and she is the person who denies that he possibly could have been in love with the girl in the blue film, helping her as her friend to make money she badly needed, because a woman as frigid as Mrs. Carter believes a man cannot love a tart.

It is Mrs. Carter who “implacably” takes her husband the way a sexually inadequate man takes a prostitute or Barbie and the story’s end reveals (again) Greene’s utter skillfulness in reversing the conventional thinking, making Mrs. Carter the degrader who uses her husband,

As he undressed he caught glimpses of himself in the small mirror: thirty years had not been kind: he felt his thickness and his middle age. He thought: I hope to God she’s dead. Please God, he said, let her be dead. When I go back in there, the insults will start again.

But when he returned Mrs. Carter was standing by the mirror. She had partly undressed. Her bare legs reminded him of a heron waiting for fish. She came and put her arms around him: a slave bangle joggled against his shoulder. She said, “I’d forgotten how nice you looked.”

“I’m sorry. One changes.”

“I didn’t mean that. I like you as you are.”

She was dry and hot and implacable in her desire. “Go on,” she said, “go on,” and then she screamed like an angry and hurt bird. Afterwards she said, “it’s years since that happened,” and continued to talk for what seemed a long half hour excitedly at his side. Carter lay in the dark silent, with a feeling of loneliness and guilt. It seemed to him that he had betrayed that night the only woman he loved. (p. 29)

A longish quotation, but every bit as sad and moving as the end of Joyce’s “The Dead.”

Only here we don’t have the man self-emasculated by pomposity and faux intellect whose wife has remained with him because they have a nice life, with children, and agreeable habits that compensate for Gabriel’s stiff and frigid lack of human sympathy combined with self-centeredness, as though everything in his fantasy relates to or is about him. Here we have the stiff, moralizing, frigid woman who needs the titillation of illicitness to release her from her sexual chains, though not her mental ones, patronizing her husband the way sad men patronize prostitutes. That said, we have to notice that Carter did not patronize the girl in the film—he did not go and pay a prostitute, but as the girl’s friend for at least a year with whom he thought he was in love, went and participated in the making of the blue film because “she needed a friend” to help her earn some money. Not the best way to earn money, but morally not cheap or debased—certainly not as debased as Carter is 30 years later when his wife takes him and he concedes.

It is not a direct revelation of this story for us to think that it may be wiser not to share everything about ourselves with our purported husbands, wives, and lovers. The stereotypical idea that lovers should share everything, get to know everything seems to a fiction writer false and silly, if not downright dangerous. For one freedom a fiction writer wants to reserve is the ability to modify contexts and events to fit the situation; to tell all fixes an event in such a way that it falsifies it while extracting the vitality from it. It is not dissimilar to the bridal fantasy that the wedding day is the most important day of a couples’ life: really? It’s a day you probably won’t remember much of, being busy with guests and bridesmaids and groomsmen and hoping the cake doesn’t fall into your lap as you begin to wonder if the ridge-bellied roundhead you’ve picked out to marry is going to be interesting to you in 50 years. And it is only a day, a celebration, perhaps, but like birthdays, once you’ve passed your majority like Telemachus, do the days themselves matter? You are going to have many of them (hopefully), some good and some not so good, and you may use them as mnemonic touchstones—around the time I was 20, 30, and 40 I celebrated a most important day of my life. What matters is the ongoing process of living though if you measure things by important days, limited but measurable segments of time, you have probably stepped out of Heraclitus’s river and are abandoned on a not-very-large rock. If you want to know everything about your lover (not that you may, but certainly may try in ways that lead to utter boredom), you need to be prepared for shock, surprise, and disappointment, or a yawn that engulfs you.

If we combine this with the self-absorbed notion that the whole world is insulted in our person, that is, if we are insulted the whole world ought to feel the insult and react against it and its concurrent notion that what is important to one person ought to appeal to another, we get the dangers of ironically named “social media” (they are not social or socialized at all, but unsocial and dehumanized). People, in their willingness to meet Alkinoös naked and unwashed, expose themselves immediately and these days almost without provocation, believing that they are “sharing” with equally narcissistic strangers and cheaply made “friends.” They are without caution, both about the levels of boredom and sniggering laughter, as well as about their lack of context and rhetorical presentation(s).

After all, what does the apocryphal image of underage drinkers with a cougar mom tell us when we see it posted for all, including the police, to see? Sure, a woman who needs to be arrested for breaking the law. But also a lousy parent, which is worse, and worse than that, a pathetic woman whose meaningless teenage years passed her by so that she now has to act foolishly, trying to be young(er) and be friends with as-yet-unformed yutes, while revealing her lonely, needy, sad old(er)ness. Any—any—adult who wants to be “friends” (not kindly in a mature way) with teenagers is bathetic: being willing to give up what character you have to act like unformed characters doing uninformed things is as sad as men or women installing gelatinous body parts as though their appearances altered meaningfully and did not make manifest the emptiness of their reality.

But people often get older and think and wish they could go back and be 20 again. And why? Because, without the wisdom that comes from reading, they imagine being 20 has advantages that will erase the weary banality of their pleasureless lives. They begin to cannibalize their selves, becoming as neurotically wrong as Hamlet who thinks Denmark is a prison and says to Rosencrantz—who admittedly is a courtier Yes-man—“for there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it (Denmark) is a prison” (Hamlet, II, 2). Hamlet is so inwardly tormented by what he thinks, that he has turned on thinking to lay the claim that there is nothing good or bad except we make it so by thinking. This is the disease of theorists and the infection of the educationists and language manipulators. It is simply not true. Obviously not true. There is good and there is bad and while we might argue the edges of that statement, we can’t really alter it if we have a literary view of good and bad (not a moral, Christian, Muslim, Anti-Christian, Agenda-laden one). In fiction, if a bad person in a story comes to a good end, we ought to feel discomfited, as though something is wrong. Sure, bad people manage, at least temporarily, like Bernie Madoff, good intra-medians. It’s a fact. But fact is less than fictional truth; fact is merely reality with the context removed; fact is a chamber at the end of a nuclear accelerator in which we think we can see the paths of sub-nuclear particles; fact does not tell us where to place our focus in order to understand something.

Fact is plot. “Plot,” which is an inadequate way to talk about literature, is merely a false construction by which we attempt to explain what is or almost is unexplainable. Ineffable. Isn’t this one reason Christians invented hell, eventually conceding to a hint that there is no afterlife by calling it hell on earth? Religions, faiths in something other, give structure, value, and a sensation of purpose to life and love that otherwise might—might to the un-literarily minded—seem somewhat empty or meaningless.

The background of time that substitutes in effect for religion in storytelling foreshortens once again as young people turn toward superficial irony as their modus operandi. Note, not literary irony, that tension between Hamlet’s “seems” and what is, that structural current that after the first section runs beneath “The Death of Ivan Illych” as we read, shocking us with periodic realizations that—just as Ivan finds his income some five hundred rubles too small, or out of a similar feeling of guilt over not loving his wife as in Greene’s “The Blue Film,” hangs new curtains—he is already dead. Not the irony that weighs heavily on our souls—and at the end, Gabriel Conroy’s—in “The Dead.” But an irony that recognize and believes that surface is all there is, a snide, almost nihilistic irony that denies meaning outside of the miniscule moments that make up the lives of “Whatever.”

The background of time against which a human might set herself, a background of decades and centuries of what it means to be human begins with the aesthetic cannibalism of the 1960s and 1970s to become little vignettes. We began to see the past as a burden, a problem, that might be overcome and we experimented with form and language to the end that we began to relinquish structure. Our meanings, what one might call the philosophies behind the writers, seemed to degrade as we understood less what it meant to be a human being and more what it meant to be a political or sociological individual and up and through the vaunted Raymond Carver—one of the dearest men anyone was ever lucky enough to know—our stories shrank from early middles in which the beginnings were present and the endings at least implied, middle middles of dramatic language and process, and ends that satisfied not only the reader’s need for open- or closed-ends, until they lost the structure of the stories themselves as well as the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• One   The Anti-conspiracy
• Two   Homecoming’s Not a Dance
• Three   Truth and Beauty: When Divine Horizons Shrink and the Gods Pack Up to Leave
• Four   Sex, More Sex, and a Little Corruption
• Five   The Nibelungenrap
• Six   Separation of Life from Life
• Seven   Dublin’s Polonius
• Eight   Censoring the Censor
• Nine   Death by Hot Air
• Ten   Unsanforized™ Time
• Eleven   Hamsters with Liquid Eyes
• Twelve   Simplifying Our Days
• Thirteen   Weary Work
• Fourteen   The Life of Swans
• Fifteen   Inversions
• Sixteen   In a Hole in the House of the Famous Poet
• Afterword:  Remembering What We Don’t Know We’ve Lost
• Notes