We all like telling each other stories about our lives and this is how we share aspects of who and what we are. We connect with others and with ourselves through storytelling as stories shape and reshape our life narratives.
Story telling is not a secondary aspect of our lives.It is essential to finding a voice of our own. It allows the ‘lighthouse self’ to radiate outwards and to shine.
We ‘perform’ whom we are and hope our listeners are entertained.Our stories are verbal gifts to be exchanged and passed around, leading to friendship, understanding and even revelation.
Thus we build up our identities through these storytelling gift- performances and give our self concept a boost via story telling as a form of ‘social scaffolding or cement’.
For Story telling is essential to our ability to make friends and to help us make sense of our daily experience.
Imagine a day deprived of any access to stories, whether with our families,through news at work, media tales, even those stories we tell ourselves within the confines of our own heads!
Take a moment and imagine a story less day.
I have recently been reading Saki’s stories and one of the delights of his excellent tales is that they can be told again to friends and listeners, through paraphrase and editing .
This allows our immediate pleasure and response to be shared and I have enthusiastically ‘retold’ several Saki tales after reading them in their original state.
What I wonder is the gift of retelling?
And do all stories lend themselves to retelling or are some tales so intensely ‘private’ or impressionistic that they remain to elusive to be retold?
My excited retelling of Saki’s The Storyteller to my brother Duncan was great fun as it allowed the ‘kernel’ or ‘essence’ of the tale to be passed on as an anecdotal response to his family’s own feelings around ‘being a good child’, as opposed to being a more ‘naughty child.’
In turn he went home and told the tale to his children. and perhaps my ‘naughty nephew’ Jack felt somewhat redeemed by this transatlantic gift from Saki!
For the tale wittily reveals that the ‘horribly good’ child gets eaten by the hungry wolf as a direct result of her goodness.
Her goodness has rewarded her with a set of three medals and these medals chime unfortunately together making a distinctive sound , so that the predatory wolf can find her hiding place and eat her-save for the medals of course.
‘The story began badly’, said the smaller of the small girls, ‘but it had a beautiful ending.’
‘It is the most beautiful story that I have ever heard,’ said the bigger of the small girls, with immense decision.
The children enjoy the unconventionality of the story. They recognise its gift of subversion and rhapsodise accordingly. I love the accent on the size of the speakers as this reveals the comparative contrast with the adult world and well as ironically ‘simplifying’ the narrative.
By contrast this ‘gift’ of retelling is largely absent from William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield. Their stories are by and large, inferred suggestions about a situation and the subtly realised impressionistic detail cannot be paraphrased readily.
So perhaps their writing remains a private pleasure, something that cannot stride purposefully outside of the narrative framework as a gift to be revisited through retelling.
Saki offers the reader an alternative to the private pleasures of the written word. He empowers the reader will the ability to make public a splendid ‘gift’ to be delivered by mouth, passing on the ‘kernel’ of a situation or event, allowing the reader to reshape the tale according to their story telling inclination!
