Storytelling and Storytellers

 

Mankind has a long history of telling stories. Currently we go to YouTube and Netflix to hear the stories of our culture. Just prior to that, we went to the cinema. For many generations before that, we went to bookshops if we had disposable cash and libraries if we didn’t, to read the written word. Arguably, the written word was-and-is better for our brains than visual storytelling: we had to imagine the scenery, give the characters their faces and voices using our own brainpower and visual creativity. Now the director does all of that for us.

Before widespread literacy, though, our storytelling was all oral. To the pre-literate, our young children, it still is: a parent perches on the edge of their bed with a book, and with a greater or lesser degree of expressiveness and relish, reads them a bedtime story.

Since the times of early Christianity, the people gathered in churches weekly, to listen to the literate priest tell them the written-down stories of their people. Since the earliest times of agriculture around the time the earliest alphabets were just being devised, after the harvest and before the next planting when there was less heavy physical labour to do, people would gather when darkness fell, and listen to the stories of their people.  Since the earliest times of pre-human language when every day in every life was dangerous, people would gather around fires at night, and listen to the stories of their people.

And it is those earliest stories, the unrecoverable ones, that fascinate me the most. Early humans and proto-humans were migratory. They followed the cycles of plenty and scarcity in the plants that gave them life, and they followed the migrations of the game-animals that gave them life.

Because of the lack of writing implements and sound-recording devices at the time, there is only very indirect evidence of those earliest stories. Fossil records, middens and ancient art combined, only hint at their stories.

If I were a very early human sitting around a campfire with my kin, what would I tell them? I might tell them that when I was a small child my family-group came from the other side of those hills (pointing), but that the rivers and streams dried up and we had to climb the hills and come to this side to find water to drink, fruit trees that hadn’t died, and animals that had fled the famine before us or with us.

Or I might show you specimens of fungi I had gathered during the day, and tell stories about how this one and that one both tasted delicious, but when my sibling ate one of those other ones, they vomited for days and then died, and make sure everyone in the group could tell which one was poisonous.

I might tell you how I was told by my grandfather that one day when his father was a child the river broke its banks when there had been no rain, and the community was swept away as it slept in its camp in the dried riverbed, and how that flood must have been from the gods as there had been no rain, so the people who drowned as they slept were the bad ones, but we are all the descendants of the ones who lived, so we are the good ones, whom the gods love.

I might tell you a story that my grandfather’s grandmother told him, of when we lived in the hilly country, and a neighbouring band of strangers fought us and killed most of our warrior-hunters and stole some of our younger women, so we picked up our children and fled, and now we live in the coastal marshes on fish and crabs, instead of in the hills eating large four-footed animals.

I might tell you a story about how we came, just a few of us, from far away over the sea, clinging to fallen trees after a huge storm, licking their leaves and bark and our own skin for water as we floated, until we reached this island we are on now. And how our ancestors learnt to hollow the logs out and make the ends pointy so that it would slide through the water, and learnt to paddle with flattened sticks, and how we explored and settled all the islands hereabouts when our numbers had grown.

Any of these stories, and many others besides, could have been told over and over, by successive generations, each generation and each storyteller within the generation embroidering some details and forgetting others, or else, if the story is crucial for survival (like fungus-identification) making sure to repeat it exactly. Storytelling was to early humans what a complex technical education is to us: the passing-on of skills and knowledge that will enable the younger people to be able to survive and, hopefully, thrive.

Thus, storytelling is profoundly and fundamentally human, going back to our deepest origins and coded in every cell of our bodies. We are, as Bryce Courtenay once said (and I paraphrase) either storytellers, or listeners, and if we neither tell stories nor listen to them, we wither away and die, if not physically, then at least spiritually.

For a few generations now, we have been relying on flickering screens to give us our stories. My parents – or at least my mother – hated the idea of waste and pop-culture, so we didn’t have a television until well after the moon landing (which we watched on a relative’s TV), so I lived the first nine or ten years in a TV-free zone.

At night, after our bedtime, I remember night after night, watching the yellow triangle of light on my bedroom wall from the slightly opened door, and listening to Janacek, Vaughan Williams, Kodaly, Smetana or Sibelius as my parents sat in the well-lit living-room, reading. The music was complex and powerful, and hit you right in the core of your emotions. And sometimes my father would be amused by a sentence or a paragraph, so he’d read it aloud to share the pleasure with my mother – his voice was too quiet to hear from my room at the other end of the hall, but the lesson was loud that reading was a treasure.

Later, when I had learnt to read, the world unfurled for me. I read omnivorously: nursery rhymes, fairy tales, Dr Seuss, A Child’s Treasury of Greek Myths (there was some really dirty sex in that, it would be banned today, but it was absolutely right to read stuff like that as young as possible), Tisi and the Yabby, 365 Things to Know, the Child’s Encyclopaedia of Science.

My parents’ books were on shelves all around the house. Every single room had books, including the shitter. I helped myself, as my reading skills improved. I read Portnoy’s Complaint and Lolita when my age was in single figures, and understood them, too. (I understood Lolita as a child better than most adults do: it is not a book in praise of paedophilia, but one showing you what a dreadful specimen the stepfather was, and how miserable the girl was.)

My own turning-point came when I first read Patrick White, also in single figures (I was nine, a year older than the character Gandalf in my book, who read him at eight). I think my first White book was either A Fringe of Leaves or The Solid Mandala, but whichever it was, I read it, then the other, then all the rest of them on the shelf, in rapid succession. A lot of people I know have a special fondness for Voss. I particularly like The Vivisector, which Gandalf did, too, being a man of taste. From that moment onwards, I was always going to listen to the stories of my ancestors, fossilised forever in paper and ink.

Some time towards the end of the 1990s I started catching Jennifer Byrne hosting Foreign Correspondent. I liked her voice, her intelligence, her eyes. I loved her smile, especially her signing-off smile. I watched every episode for that smile. I was crushed when George Negus took over, but delighted when she founded the First Tuesday Book Club, or as it later became known, just Book Club. Sometimes I bought the books she liked, sometimes I didn’t. I found that more often than not, our likes and dislikes coincided.

I was, then, understandably shocked, when the whole book club core, Jennifer and Jason and Marieke, all turned out to dislike a Patrick White novel and regarded his literary style as dense and hard to read. I had found it easy to read and easy to understand and to like, even when I was a child! I found myself shouting at the screen, as I might shout at a particularly recalcitrant politician during a TV interview.

Patrick White was a quintessentially Australian storyteller. Contrary to popular opinion, and theirs, his male characters were just as unlikeable as his female characters. I suspect he might simply have just spent too much time in the company of – and observing closely – a great many regular human beings, few of whom have very many redeeming characteristics when they are under stress. And let’s face it – it is an author’s job to put their characters under stress, and observe carefully the many different ways that they might crack when that stress keeps building up.

But authors aren’t the only storytellers. As descendants of our earliest storytelling ancestors, any of us who have any kind of life-experience, are storytellers. We have a grasp on language, and we have had experiences which might amuse others, or touch others, or frighten others, or anger others, or delight others, or instruct others. And any experience we may have had, when recast as a story, can teach, directly or indirectly, if only teaching us how to think critically by being an uninteresting story. We should all be sitting around that campfire with our peers, listening to their stories and telling our own.

Even in literature, the philosophy of sitting around telling stories in the evening is common. The fictitious Sheherazade did it in the Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio’s characters did it in the Decameron, and Geoffrey Chaucer did it in the Canterbury Tales. Of those three examples, the first is an example of a single storyteller, telling incomplete story after story every night, to save herself from being executed by her husband.

The frame stories for the other two involve multiple narrators telling stories to amuse each other and to fill in time: from memory I believe the narrators in the Decameron are in isolation in the countryside trying to escape an outbreak of smallpox or the Plague, while Chaucer’s character-narrators are on a pilgrimage together, and tell stories each night along the way as they rest and prepare for their travel the next day.

If a novel is an ornate necklace, then each chapter is a gem. If a collection of short stories is a jewellery box filled with individual gems, a collection of narratives linked by a framing-story such as in those three classic examples, is a fine gold chain with a number of gems strung on it, the better displayed for being strung on the framing gold chain.

I wrote my first full-length novel at 62 - I was the queen of the short story for the decades leading up to that. A week after I finished the draft, I put it aside, and started another. I decided to follow the glowing examples of Sheherazade, Chaucer and Boccaccio. It is cheating to cannibalise your back-catalogue for little gems of stand-alone short stories, to thread onto the gold chain of a framing story? 

And I like my framing-story. Set in the Nullarbor, which I know, in a time of devastating climate change, which is topical, without electricity or WiFi, modern-day humans who are used to being spoon-fed their stories on demand, start to starve. That, or they start telling stories amongst themselves, just as our ancestors did.

I’m not sure if I have gems to offer in the new work I'm assembling, or just pretty coloured glass. I’m also not sure if the chain joining them is pure gold or just cheap rolled gold. But why not take your chances, once I get it published? Open the casket. Reach in. Read.