SEEKING THE NEW ENCOUNTER: The Pastoral and Prophetic in Storytelling

I'm posting this as a suggestion for discussion about the role of the storyteller-how do you percieve it? Its clear the position that the below essay is interested in, but there will be a myriad of different perceptions of what you believe the role engenders. If you tell stories why do you do it? How do you establish a connection to the prophetic in your own telling of myth? Is such a connection important?

Storytelling is an interpretative improvisation; it is jazz; it is primordial, immediate responsive theatre….the storyteller is simultaneously Author/Adaptor, Performer and Director of his or her own work. (5) Ben Haggarty, ibid

Haggarty declares a loyalty to the moment, that something fresh is birthed, its impact being dependent on the skills and wit of the performer. But what of the story itself? Is it possible that some independent energy in the story itself is involved in the performative experience? That the storyteller as personality is a conduit for something larger? The author falls short of describing this as an act of mediumship, but it is certainly an internal collaboration.

Varients of Teller

Broadly speaking, in all post-hunter-gatherer cultures, two distinct storytelling traditions have always existed side by side: parallel yet mutually supportive. The first has become known as the ‘fireside’ tradition and the second, the ‘professional’ tradition. The fireside tradition refers to the unpaid, informal social telling of tales in the home, in them pub, as a hobby and to shorten the road. This tradition is ‘amateur’ in the original, non-judgemental sense of the word – i.e. it is done with an enthusiasm born of love. It could also be called the folk tradition.

In Europe the professional tradition once had formal titles associated with it, such as Bard, Scop, Skald, Trouvere, Minnesinger, etc. To this day, beyond the borders of Europe (and outside of the Eurocentric ‘box’), terms such as Ashik, Akyn and Griot come into play. This tradition refers to the telling of tales in formal contexts, by (trained) professional artists: entertainers and orators, who receive financial remuneration for their expertise, repertoire and the conscious skill of their craft.

(7) Ben Haggarty, ibid

We note from Haggarty a useful discernment between strands of the art form, that distinctions can and should be made. However, I would suggest that there is a third element that can be present in both traditions that is to do with the interiority of the practice, the animistic tradition of the storyteller, a position far more complex than something defined by financial gain or professional standing. The above description is an informed clarifier, but loses some magical connotation. This emphasis is referring story back to its oldest origins; its relationship to Shamanism.

Haggarty’s associations are valid, but to build on them I would have to suggest a more porous, tricksterish quality to the Storyteller: to allow the medium of Soul-Teacher into its description. Lewis Hyde claims that, "trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there…we constantly distinguish-right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead-and in very case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction…trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox" (8) Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, (North Point Press, 1998) p7. So, by using the phrase ‘porous’ I suggest the storyteller as one that stands between regimented tradition and the desire for entertainment, and an image-language that seeks radical connections and strange accords.

Stories in their earliest form were vehicles to express localised cosmologies, but also touched beyond the limits of tribal life, and in doing so, created a connection between wider perceptions of community, a community that incorporated nature and certain intense, spiritual energies that abided in it. The storyteller held that information, and passed knowledge of herbalism, dreams and ritual through the images contained. With the breakdown of cohesive rites-of-passage, this prophetic connotation has largely left our associations of myth. I use prophetic to describe a consciousness that invokes new thoughts, a breaking of stagnant boundaries, and profound openess to the unseen. If the teller has not been exposed to the velocity, or even concept of this function, then how could they honestly embody it?

The Pastoral and the Prophetic

The beautiful thing about traditional tales, the thing that makes them interesting, and endlessly adaptable, is that they do not speak their truths directly. Traditional tales use the hidden language of metaphor…you could say it might be said that there are as many hidden stories within a narrative as there are tellers and listeners. (15) Sally Pomm Clayton, Into the Hidden Country (Society for Storytelling Press, 2008) p.7

My concern with much contemporary storytelling is a hesitancy to explore metaphor, that a superstitious code prevents any deeper implications being explored. In a society that largely ignores depth and metaphor in favour of the shallow and literal, Pomm Clayton’s ‘hidden stories’ are not always accessed. The folk-tale sits rather like a wedding cake- we scrape off the icing but never dig our spoon into its fruity depths.

Without this push to the edge of our understanding, the storyteller merely recites the pastoral; tales over-polished to assure and titillate the human community, lacking a Blake-ian edge to allow the truly visionary to push at the boundaries. The pastoral offers a salve, an affirmation of old, shared values, a reiteration of the power of the herd. The prophetic almost always brings some conflict with it- it disarms, awakens, challenges and deepens. It is far less to do with ‘enchantment’ and much more to do with ‘waking up’.

The prophetic engages the intelligence of the adult, is suffused in paradox, carries perceptive weight from unusual angles, is not designed to reassure. The prophetic is rarely the guest at the children’s birthday party, but by its very nature moves swiftly from group to group. Communities rarely grow around its rain soaked words. It is not designed purely for stability, but for growth. It seeks not to destroy old forms for the sake of it, but rather to reanimate their propensity for holy thought. In this regard, Trickster is truly its totem.

A certain sense of excitement is generated by the liminal…feelings close to disquiet and discomfort are experienced…liminal performance strives to play at the edge of the possible, continually challenging not only performance practice but also traditional aesthetic concepts. 16) Susan Broadhurst, Liminal Acts: A Critical Overview of Contemporary Performance and Theory, (cassell press, 1999) p 1.

When the emphasis is too pastoral, otherness is not touched, and myth becomes merely a defensive cluster of societal anecdotes. To allow precedent for the anthropocentric is to deny the contrary tensions of the truly bardic. This very crossroads is the highest gift that story can offer, and implicit in its performance is incantation, a kind of efficacious opening, something only possible by an interior awakening in the myth-teller. One could argue it is the difference between a craft and an art.

Hope therefore lies in a poetry through which the world so invades the spirit of man that he becomes almost speechless, and later reinvents a language…true poetry is what does not pretend to be poetry. It is in the dogged drafts of a few maniacs seeking the new encounter.

21 Francis Ponge, News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness, Edt Robert Bly, (Sierra Club Books, 1980) p214