The Return of the Storyteller in Contemporary Fiction 9781472593870, 9780826439901, 9781474275675

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For Justin and Sophia

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Acknowledgements This book began with a questioning of the contentious line between oral and written fiction, with a questioning of the origins of the stories that live within the written world of the novel. The subsequent investigation led me to begin a doctorate to find the answer and it was here where I first discovered the storyteller, a figure whose story I have been compelled to discover and to tell. I am hugely grateful therefore, first, to my doctoral supervisor Pat Waugh for all her help, advice and not least, her friendship who has been there from the early stages of my research to its final form in this book. I would like to express my sincerest thanks to Marc Botha and Maebh Long for their erudite corrections, their help and friendship during the final stages of the book and also to Sam Thomas for answering my last-minute questions. I am also very grateful to all the editors at Continuum and Bloomsbury, and especially David Avital, for his continued patience and belief in the book. On a personal level, I am extremely grateful to my parents for all their support and encouragement over the years. Thank you to Emma and Evaggelia who believed in me when I most needed it. I also want to thank my husband Justin for his love and understanding throughout the whole process. My final thanks and love goes to my daughter Sophia, who, unknowingly, just by being there, gave me the push I need to finally get the book finished.

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Introduction

The aim of this book is to establish a prominent place for the storyteller in critical engagements with contemporary fiction. A brief survey of critical literature reveals that, to date, sightings of the storyteller have been (deliberately) scarce. We could speculate that this is due to the fact that the storyteller is most often conceived of as the progenitor of an oral tradition significantly different to the literary tradition, and as a result has been rendered voiceless within academic responses to the novel. However, we might more confidently lay blame at the door of Walter Benjamin, whose highly influential essay ‘The Storyteller’ (1936) set in motion the storyteller’s untimely demise.1 Written at the dawn of modern institutionalized literary criticism, Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ not only heralded the death of the storyteller, precipitating the rise of the figure of the author, but arguably paved the way for the subsequent approaches to criticism that followed its publication. Indeed, its influence on twentieth-century literary criticism should not be underestimated, a fact that has led Ivan Kreilkamp to pronounce the essay as ‘simply, one of the founding statements of twentieth-century theory of the novel’.2 Benjamin posits the storyteller as surrounded by an aura that elevates him3 to almost angelic heights: a righteous hero whose ‘parting exit’ signals the loss of wisdom, not only for an age, but for all mankind. No longer capable of being saved, the storyteller has been pushed out by the bolder, stronger other, by the individualist bully otherwise known as the novelist and his duplicitous partner-in-crime, the reader. Unlike the storyteller’s partner the listener, whose main inclination was to repeat the story he heard – thus creating a context for the communicability of experience and the transference of a story’s ultimate purpose, which is to offer counsel – the reader is fuelled by a desire to possess the text. A dirty picture thus emerges: the reader is a jealous creature and, like an illicit lover, is driven by the author’s careful promise of individual gain, fired by suspense, at once consumed and consuming, guarding the story as his own.

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For Benjamin, the oral storyteller faded into obscurity with the birth of print culture, a rupture which was created by a cruel and inorganic modernity where the voice of the storyteller was silenced and where the ‘silent’ text took its place. Since then the storyteller has remained, for the most part, in the shadows. However, the question as to why the storyteller, at least within the field of literary criticism, has been mostly absent, remains unanswered. Perhaps it is criticism’s subsequent dominant turn towards textuality, mirrored also in the rise of theory, that have helped anchor Benjamin’s storyteller to the murky depths of a forgotten oral storytelling past. Or perhaps it is something simpler: the essay’s own mythic status in critical history that has helped to perpetuate the belief that the storyteller has no place in the novel criticism. Precisely because its influence is so far-reaching, this dominant interpretation, that the storyteller’s death has precipitated the ascendancy of the author and author criticism, has come to be set in stone; and there it has remained, secured in history, a monument marking the beginning of a discipline. This book looks to change this mythology and return the storyteller to the novel, reasserting his place in the critical discourses that concern the interpretation of contemporary fiction. Building on Benjamin’s dictum, I expose how the author’s domination of the literary critical limelight has helped us not only perpetuate the myth of the death of the storyteller, but also confine both the storyteller and his discourse, storytelling, to an oral tradition that is (mostly) conceived as being separate from the literary one. This study identifies how the storyteller has been appropriated by contemporary writers not simply as a trope, or figure within the novel, but as a more defiant figure, one that challenges the dominant conceptualization surrounding the novelistic author and calls for its re-evaluation. Through the figure of the storyteller, ‘storytelling’ – the discourse of the storyteller – is foregrounded and presented not only as a means of knowing the world, but is also set up to question the grand narratives of history, religion and politics, as well as ideological constructs such as nationhood. As a figure which traditionally represents communal rather than individual truths, the storyteller emerges defiantly as one who is capable of wearing all narrative masks and assuming all authorial positions: narrator, novelist, author. This capacity to shape-shift into various figures, all of whom insist on telling stories (as opposed to truths), endows the storyteller with the capacity to evade the authority and responsibility for the text that is often construed as synonymous with the author, which has implications for areas such as the authorial ‘individual talent’, as well as the role and purpose of fiction itself.

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The storyteller’s return indicates a crucial shift in narrative theory where a previously dominant interest in writing and textuality is slowly giving way to a new appreciation of oral traditions and storytelling methods, bringing with it a return to story and narrative. With the rise of postmodernism, the growing internationalization of the novel in English and the injection of an ever-growing number of postcolonial writers writing in English, we have witnessed a turn away from the realist tradition and a return to storytelling in the novel. In the ever-growing body of literature written and/or available in English, this internationalization is now pervasive in the novel form, and novelists are borrowing from the storytelling tradition and assuming the form of storytellers in order to more accurately reflect contemporary contexts and preoccupations. It is from this perspective that I call for a shift in our critical focus, in order to recognize the return of the storyteller to literary fiction. I argue that the figure of the storyteller is better placed than that of the author to reflect contemporary constructions of reality. The notion of the storyteller as presented in this book rests on the idea that the storyteller is not simply an oral figure, but one that can occupy the unique but often contested space between the oral and the written which has implications for criticism that works on a variety of levels. First, this conceptualization of the storyteller brings into play the whole gamut of arguments that surround the relationship between speech and writing in academic criticism. As a relationship that has dominated critical debate for over a century, specifically in relation to critical concerns surrounding the novel and its authors, the storyteller’s position helps us to bridge the gap between speech and writing. Furthermore, in a distinctly deconstructive register, it clarifies that the relationship between speech and writing is not simply one of binary opposition. I call into question the myth that the storyteller is only associated with the oral tradition and with oral storytelling, a narrative mode which, as with the perception of the storyteller himself, is very loosely defined in academic criticism. A final aim of this book is to demonstrate how the storyteller occasions a reexamination of our critical categories in which narrative is ordinarily examined. Most often, readings of the storyteller are grounded in a mistaken perception that the storyteller (as a figure chiefly identified with oral storytelling traditions) might only appear and/or be associated with novels from Third World, or Postcolonial cultures where ‘oral storytelling’ is more commonplace and the ‘literary’ tradition is perceived as ‘emerging’. This kind of approach is not only Western-centric, but the inherent cultural bias it reflects serves to further concretize the Third World/ First World, East/West, Colonial/Postcolonial

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binaries within which these constructs exist. The intimate relationship that novelists from Postcolonial cultures such as Africa or India have with an oral tradition might appear more obviously linked in the novels from these countries, but it does not follow that ‘Western’ (by this I mean European and American in the main) novelists have no relationship to the oral tradition or the storyteller. In fact, it is the perception of the literary tradition as being wholly other to the oral tradition which perpetrates this misguided belief, and with that calls into question all beliefs that seek to categorize in the first place. This book posits a conception of the storyteller as a transnational and transhistorical figure, one which also does not rest in a specific gender. This notion of the storyteller as a figure that exists in all cultures, moves a step closer to the notion of ‘world literature’.4 In challenging the dominant perception of the storyteller as a figure that lives outside the world of the novel (or the text) and by returning the storyteller to contemporary fiction (drawing on examples from North and South America, Africa, India and Britain), the storyteller emerges as one who breaks down of the still-existing boundaries between current approaches to reading that are often wrongly polarized. This unifying approach that the figure of the storyteller allows, in turn, presents us with a more ethical way of conceptualizing authorship, one that push us to approach the constructs of a post-postmodernist culture of reading and writing which, in turn, move beyond these binary, ethno-centric or hierarchical constructs. *

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The book is broadly divided into two sections. The first two chapters provide the theoretical underpinning for how we might (re)conceptualize the storyteller in contemporary fiction, exploring the key facets of this debate. The following six chapters explore how contemporary writers have demonstrated a significant preoccupation with the storyteller through close reading of one or more of a particular writer’s works. The purpose of close reading is threefold: first, the fact that I engage in close reading of a variety of novels by international (and influential) writers is purposeful in that it serves to develop my argument for the return of the storyteller by establishing it as a key preoccupation;5 second, it offers a new approach to the reading of each specific novel and writer by engaging with relevant criticism on that particular text showing how the engagement with storyteller sheds new light on the text; third, close reading demonstrates the practical application of the reading of storyteller in contemporary fiction, and thus acts as a pointer for future scholarship in this area.

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Chapter 1 begins with the question ‘who is the storyteller?’ and maps the historical representations of the storyteller in oral and literate traditions and in cultures and communities across the globe as a means of establishing his function and common characteristics. What emerges from this investigation is that the storyteller is not a concrete figure, but a transhistorical and transcultural one. As such, it is more useful to see him as a kind of ‘palimpsest’ figure that embodies certain generic characteristics and functions. This brings us towards a definition of the storyteller that will aid our subsequent search for him in the novels discussed. Chapter 2 then moves from a mapping of the (trans)historical figure and his function in society, to how this figure has been discussed and conceived in literary criticism, exploring critical engagements with the storyteller to date. This investigation takes as its starting point Benjamin’s seminal essay, exploring it first, in order to determine its place, influence and reception within literary critical history and endeavour. Importantly, despite its ambiguities, the essay remains one of the few to directly link the figure of the storyteller to the writer. As such, the second key aspect of this exploration re-examines the essay with the aim of assessing to what extent it can be used as a model for identifying the storyteller within contemporary fiction. From the emergent discussion, the chapter moves into the larger frame of literary criticism and its responses to the figure of the storyteller and enters into a debate with this reception, which I posit as ultimately misconceived. The reasons for this are varied, but in the main stem from a direction in criticism – of which Benjamin’s essay was a catalyst – that firmly divided the oral and literary traditions which saw the rise of the author (and author criticism) and the death of the storyteller in the novel. However, I draw on a number of key studies which have begun to contest this dominant conceptualization of the storyteller in the novel, and formulate an argument which sees, instead, that the storyteller may have always been with us, turning finally to how and why I call for his return. The subsequent chapters (3–8), each take one contemporary novelist and through a focused reading of one (or more) of their novels examine the engagement with the storyteller. The choice of readings is drawn in part from the choice of text, one in which the storyteller either figures, or implicitly problematizes. However, as these chapters serve as a means of exploring how we might read the storyteller in contemporary fiction, this choice is equally driven by an attempt to provide examples that can be construed as (broadly) representative of trends in contemporary fiction. The selection of texts comes from six internationally and critically acclaimed authors from distinct backgrounds, cultures, continents and genders to demonstrate that the preoccupation with the

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storyteller is representative in a wide range of categories and critical discourses (e.g. feminist, postcolonial, Western, national, continental). These are, (in order of appearance): Jim Crace, Mario Vargas Llosa, Salman Rushdie, John Barth, A.S. Byatt and J. M. Coetzee.6 Each chapter is singularly focused on a specific writer and novel (or novels) and is informed by ideas that are particular to the reading of that work. The focus of each chapter is reflected in part by the title of the chapter which serves as an entry point into the exploration of the text(s). However, aside from the preoccupations which arise that are wholly particular to any one novel or reading, as the book progresses certain ideas drawn from the readings emerge that return and recur throughout. For example, these include: the story of the birth of the storyteller, which is linked to a preoccupation with the primitive, with origins and with narrative traditions; the role of the storyteller as authoritative author-god or liar-storyteller; the storyteller as reteller and the postmodern turn in literature; the relationship between oral and written modes and traditions which pertain to critical debates surrounding speech and writing; the storyteller and fairy tales, folktales and the framed narrative; the performative aspects of the storyteller, his embodiment and his relationship to the audience, which re-thinks the relationship of the reader as listener; the relationship between the oral storyteller and the ‘writerly’ author or novelist, and the narrator; and finally, to the notion of storytelling in relation to themes such as for survival, otherness, marginalization and identity. Although many of these themes and concerns surface in each of the readings, chapters have been broadly organized in such a way so as to allow preoccupations, themes and foci investigated to follow on from each other as much as possible in order to create a sense of progression and continuity. We can broadly conceptualize this in terms of a movement from mythologized to demythologized representations of the storyteller, from the employment of fabulative modes to modes that are, with increasing degrees, more and more self-consciously assumed. Chapter 3 begins with Jim Crace’s novel The Gift of Stones (1988) and the birth of the storyteller and serves to highlight some of the key concepts surrounding the storyteller that emerge in the following chapters (as indicated earlier) on the nature, function and role of the storyteller within contemporary fiction. Set in a Stone Age village the novel tells the story of the birth of the ‘first’ storyteller, and the birth of the storytelling tradition brought to light through the figure of the narrator. In Crace, we are presented with a mythologized storyteller that emerges from a self-contained world where his role in relation to his community

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or tribe is foregrounded. The birth of the storyteller emerges from the experience of the wounded body which in turn gives rise to the experience of otherness. Storytelling is not only linked to illness and disability, but becomes a powerful tool for healing and redemption for both the individual and the community. Crace’s storyteller highlights the integral role the storyteller and his stories have in communities but sees this in an evolutionary capacity, one that is essential in the quest for survival. Following the idea of birth and deformity, Chapter 4 develops the idea of storytelling and survival by tracing not the birth but the re-birth of the tribal storyteller in a ‘primitive’ setting, the Machiguengas of the Peruvian Amazon. Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller (1988)7 returns to the mythologized figure of the storyteller but juxtaposes him against the modern world of late twentieth-century Lima. Here, the preoccupation with the ‘otherness’ of the storyteller is explored further in relation to ethnicity, highlighting the importance of storytelling to the formation of identity politics. The storytellerprotagonist is cast out of his community due to a bodily disfigurement, only to find a home as the storyteller to an indigenous Amazonian tribe. However, in Vargas Llosa’s novel, the storyteller is more self-consciously assumed and is set against the equally elusive figure of the novelist-narrator, who (implicitly) is telling his story drawing on a range of intertextual allusions. Chapter 5 provides a reading of two of Salman Rushdie’s novels Midnight’s Children (1981) and Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) exploring Rushdie’s engagement with the figure of the storyteller, as well as touching upon the way in which this figure is also problematized in his controversial novel The Satanic Verses (1988). I concentrate on the way in which Rushdie has drawn intricately on oral storytelling traditions and on the figure of the oral storyteller in these novels and uncover how these preoccupations reveal themselves to be not only integral to the construction of Rushdie’s novels, reflecting his preoccupation with identity, migrancy and cultural hybridity, but also to his conception of the function and purpose of fiction and the novel in contemporary (world) cultures and societies. For Rushdie, storytelling, the art of the storyteller is presented as one of the most important of human discourses – man being the ‘storytelling animal’ – and is, in Rushdie’s contention, both a means of discovering the world but also importantly, of knowing the world. In each of these novels, story is posited against another discourse – the grand narratives of history, politics, and or/divine history – whereby the concept of truth is contested. In each case, it is storytelling that emerges as the most powerful discourse, perhaps even controversially, the most ‘truthful’ discourse amongst others, despite its the fact

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that it is premised on untruth or ‘fiction’. My exploration of Midnight’s Children through to the Satanic Verses and finally to Haroun brings to light the way in which the storyteller and his art become crucial to this argument for ‘fiction’ that Rushdie’s novels present. However, it is in Haroun where this becomes most poignantly and most vehemently expressed. Disguised in the form of a storybook for children, I read this novel as a powerful reply to ‘The Rushdie Affair’ whereby Rushdie, through the tale of a storyteller who loses his ability to story-tell sends out a powerful ‘oral’ message that argues not simply, as has been suggested, for the Freedom of Speech, but for the freedom to tell stories. Chapter 6 explores John Barth’s The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), a novel which presents the storyteller primarily as a re-teller of tales following the traditional tale-telling of Scheherazade, the frame-narrator of The Thousand and One Nights.8 A closer study of Barth’s fiction reveals that more than any other writer in this book he has identified himself with the storyteller, actually modelling himself on the fictional storyteller, Scheherazade. His novel Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991) perfectly exemplifies this influence. Set between the world of medieval Baghdad of the ‘Arabian Nights’ tales and Barth’s own hometown of Maryland, Last Voyage features a complex web of embedded stories as well as a crowd of storytellers – Scheherazade, Sindbad and Somebody – which are used as a means of propelling the narrative forward, following Todorov’s model of ‘narrative men’. Barth’s novel juxtaposes the conventional mode of novelistic realism against that of the performative and oral mode of traditional storytellers of the Nights, an experiment in fiction which disproves Benjamin’s contention that the storyteller and novelist are ‘distinct’ in their roles and the modes of fiction they employ. Barth’s fictional experimentation as exemplified in this novel is intricately linked to his status as one of the harbingers of postmodernist fiction in America, whose impetus lay in ‘replenishing’ literature by returning to ‘past’ modes. By uncovering how Barth’s conception of literary postmodernism came out of a focus on the storyteller and oral narrative traditions, this reading has implications for the question of literary self-consciousness, ‘postmodernist’ fiction and the return of the storyteller within contemporary fiction as presented in this book. Chapter 7 explores the self-conscious appropriation of the storyteller in A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ (1994)9 while also problematizing this further by viewing it through the prism of gender. This chapter concentrates on a close reading of ‘The Djinn’, a fairy tale for adult readers, which once again sees the blending of both Eastern and Western folk- and fairy-tale traditions with conventional realism, foregrounding the replenishing of traditions within the

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novel, and exemplifying a return to narrative. ‘The Djinn’ uses the notion of retelling stories as a way of revisiting and reinterpreting ‘female’ stories and figures from past literature, both historical and fictional, in order to reposition them within a contemporary narrative tradition. Although the term ‘storyteller’ does not in itself designate gender and can indicate either a male or female figure, Byatt self-consciously highlights the storyteller as a female teller, a storytelleress.10 However, the image of the gendered storyteller is posited alongside the figure of the narratologist, who is equally gendered and both figures converge in the protagonist Dr Gillian Perholt. I argue that Byatt’s fairy- tale thus emerges as a powerful tract on the female storyteller as intellectual arguing for a reinstatement of her place within oral and written storytelling traditions, and for her recognition as a powerful cultural producer that can stand beside the previously dominant male. In the final chapter, I explore a conceptualization of the storyteller through an examination of the figure of the novelist focusing on a reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003). Mirroring in part Byatt’s protagonist Gillian Perholt, Elizabeth Costello, the fictional novelist and protagonist of Coetzee’s novel, is also presented as an important female cultural producer giving lectures at eminent universities. These lectures, all of which are framed within the novel itself, are on various subjects ranging from questions of novelistic realism to moral and ethical questions pertaining to race or to the treatment of animals. However, importantly, Costello’s lectures or ‘lessons’ all serve to highlight not, as with Byatt, issues of gender, but the more pressing question of authorship and with it the authority of the novelistic author: who is Costello? What is her role? Where does she get her truths? Should we listen to her? Coetzee’s preoccupation with the question of the identity, role and purpose of the novelist as cultural producer in a global, multi-ethnic and diverse world where the novel ‘speaks’ to people all over the globe is what is interesting here and it is the questioning and foregrounding of this role that moves us towards the figure of the storyteller. Costello’s appearance in his subsequent novel Slow Man (2001) as the authorial voice behind a novel which otherwise (largely) follows the conventions of ‘novelistic realism’ and her appearance in the ‘real’ world through the person of Coetzee himself 11 further highlights his preoccupation with the novelist and novelistic discourse and the role of both in relation to the philosophical, moral and ethical understanding of the concepts of truth and reality. Coetzee’s fiction is extremely self-reflexive, self-conscious and serious. In Coetzee, one comes to an understanding of the storyteller as a position that the novelist could occupy, as a possibility for the

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novelist in their task of writing novels. In Elizabeth Costello the storyteller neither figures as a character within the novel (as with some of the other writers I have investigated), nor is the storyteller self-conscious deployed; instead, the storyteller is demythologized, and textually generated, emerging as a conceptual figure through the act of writing and as such, points to new directions in the novel which return to questions surrounding the place and function of storytelling and the storyteller in society.

Notes 1 This is an abbreviated title to the essay which I will use throughout the book. See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, 1969 1st Shocken edn, Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 2007), 83–109. 2 Ivan Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 209. 3 Throughout this book I will be using the ‘masculine’ pronouns he/him to refer to the storyteller. Although these pronouns could be seen to indicate a bias towards the male gender, and thus my use here could be seen to further concretize the perception of the storyteller as ‘male’, I am employing them strictly so as not to jar the readership of the text by employing the more ‘politically correct’ alternative: she/her. However, it is important to stress that the storyteller does not inherently have a gender bias. In this respect I follow Ivan Kreilkamp who says: ‘the storyteller takes either male of female form without fundamentally altering the ideological and aesthetic work it performs. [. . .] Part of the strength and resilience of the ideology of myth of the storyteller, indeed, lies in its flexibility in regard to gender.’ I will discuss the issue of gender in relation to the storyteller in Chapter 7 on A. S. Byatt particularly, although it will come up at other points during my argument. See Ivan Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 4 In David Damrosch’s study ‘What is World Literature?’ (2003) he notes that the term ‘world literature’ (Weltliteratur) was originally coined by the German writer Goethe at the end of the nineteenth century, a term which Goethe qualified thus: ‘Poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men . . . I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.’ Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur came out of a new cultural

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awareness of ‘an arising global modernity’, which, as Damrosch notes, is not only the ‘epoch we now inhabit’, but one which sees this notion of ‘world literature’ resurface. In a recent article, Damrosch reflects on the notion of world literature as understood in the era of globalization and the internet, stating: ‘[. . .] literature now is entering again a multi-media space which is where literature traditionally lived all along. Most literature was not written to be read by isolated individuals. Literature was always part of the social world, whether it would be Tang Dynasty poets gathering together to drink and write poems, or giving poems as parting gifts or greeting gifts, so that poetry was a medium of social exchange almost as much as a source of private, aesthetic pleasure.’ Although Damrosch does not specifically engage with the concept of storyteller, his formulation of (world) literature as a social rather than individual practice, and one which is based on not only ‘aesthetic pleasure’ but a ‘need to exchange’, curiously, is echoed in Benjamin’s essay which I will be discussing in detail in Chapter 2. It is this notion of world literature, which, in many ways is reflective of ‘storytelling’ as it is presented in this book and with which the notion of the storyteller as the transcultural, transhistorical figure that crosses cultural, national and temporal boundaries resonates. See David Damrosch, ‘What is World Literature? David Damrosch in Conversation with Wang Ning’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 42.1 (2011): 171 and David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1. 5 All the writers and novels I read in this book are internationally renowned and have been influential in both a national and international level. Most have been involved in writing about literature as well as writing literature. Many, have used their position as public intellectual and renown as a writer to highlight causes that challenge ideologies and question our sometimes ‘invisible’ cultural codes which operate on both local, national and international levels. 6 There were many novels and novelists that I explored in my quest for the storyteller which could equally have fitted into this book. However, I have chosen instead to focus on six writers with the intention that through close reading. I can draw out ways of reading the storyteller and issues which are intricately linked with reading the storyteller in order to pave the way for further reading. These six authors are, therefore, indicative of a preoccupation with the storyteller in contemporary fiction which (broadly) has implications on the understanding of the relationship between oral and written narrative traditions vis-à-vis the novel. As such, I am not claiming that all contemporary writing demonstrates this preoccupation, as this would be far too presumptuous rather that this turn towards storytelling and the storyteller is present in contemporary fiction and is thus worthy of further investigation. 7 This text is a translation of the original novel written in Spanish: El Hablador.

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8 The Thousand and One Nights is a collection of stories that circulated predominantly during the Islamic Golden Age and were part of an oral storytelling tradition which finds roots in a variety of cultures and languages – Arabic, Indian and Persian, Egyptian – and is thought to contain stories which can be traced back to not only medieval but ancient times. The collection as we know it today is with no ‘known’ single author but the first European translation was complied by Antoine Galland in the early 1700s from an Arabic manuscript and then later translated into English in the 1800s by Edward Lane. The collection can be referred to as The Thousand and One Nights, The Thousand and One Arabian Nights, The Arabian Nights, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, but I will use the abbreviated form the Nights throughout this book. The stories within the collection are enclosed within a frame-tale of which Scheherazade is the eponymous narrator, or storyteller. I discuss the relationship to the Nights in Chapters 5, 6 and 7 in particular. To read more about the complex literary history of the Nights see Muhdin Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights. Leiden (The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1995) and Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2004). To read the stories themselves see Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. Penguin Classics. Intro and Trans by N. J. Dawood (London: Penguin, 1973). 9 I will be referring to this novella subsequently with the abbreviated title ‘The Djinn’. 10 This is a term I have self-consciously used to highlight Byatt’s gendering of the storyteller. It is not part of the novel’s rhetoric. 11 Having been invited to a number of eminent universities to give lectures on subjects within the humanities, Coetzee, in a curious parody of the fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello, famously read out extracts of what later became the novel Elizabeth Costello. Instead of ‘speaking’ in his own voice and giving his ‘own’ Coetzee hid behind the mask of Costello and it was only gradually that this became apparent to the audience. For further discussion see Chapter 8.

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A (Hi)Story of the Storyteller

The voice of the anonymous storyteller [. . .] was prior to all literature. Benjamin, Illuminations, 107 The storyteller is an archetypal figure – not in the sense of Jungian archetypes, but in the sense of an ordinary figure, prior to any specific history or nation, but upon which all histories, all nations, potentially converge. The child of a romantic imagination, the storyteller has been a constant throughout the ages, perhaps even from the birth of man. When we pronounce the word storyteller we all understand what it means, even if we do not necessarily know of someone who is an actual storyteller by profession. The storyteller is someone who simply put, ‘tells stories’,1 and inherent in the word story is the notion of fibs or lies, a notion that moves us to questions of truth and fiction. However, can we really say that this figure has a precise description? What do we actually mean when we call someone a storyteller? Who exactly is the storyteller? And what is his relationship to literature? Most often, to conjure the storyteller means to produce an image from a ‘folk’ past, an archaic figure that we do not often associate with modern living. But even when we do bring the storyteller closer to home, this connotation of ‘archaicness’, of ‘oldness’, which situates the storyteller firmly in the past, persists. For example, we see the storyteller in the teller of fairy tales and folktales, in imaginary and long-lost figures, such as Old Mother Goose and the bard. Our storyteller may be man or woman, and depending on our cultural associations, could be dressed in a turban and riding a horse, or be sitting by the hearth in a cottage in the wood. Equally, the storyteller may be your grandmother, your great uncle Tom, a fisherman, an old man of the sea, a traveller, a local witch doctor, yourself. In the storyteller we identify the ability to entertain, but there

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is a seriousness there too that we recognize as a kind of wisdom. The storyteller is a re-teller of stories, a re-worker of stories we all know and love, a re-shaper of histories, genealogies, tribal lore, gossip, and lies. But he is also a keeper of old traditions or stories from the past that without him, we would otherwise have forgotten. In the practicing of his craft, we see the storyteller delivering his stories with sparkling eyes and animated gestures, enthusiastically engaged in an act of performance. We see him shape-shifting through the ages, transforming into the court poet, taking the form of the gypsy storyteller, and manifesting in the modern-day comedian. In short, the storyteller is surrounded by his own mythology that lives outside the realms of literature. He naturally resides in the ancient world of the oral tradition, a world without the technology of writing. These stereotypes may at first glance appear a little clichéd, and in many ways they are. However, if we attempt to trace their origins, we begin to recognize that they are a direct result of a long history that witnesses the storyteller move through various guises, performing the role of someone who has a secure and essential function within human cultures and societies. This introductory chapter begins our search for the storyteller in this book by tracing a history of the storyteller throughout cultures and traditions in order to better understand not only how he has been represented, but also more importantly, what his role and function in societies across the ages has been. This is crucial, as it will give us the tools by which to recognize him in the novels examined in this book, be it through his characteristics, role and/or function, and all of which serve the larger aim of better understanding his return and role in (contemporary) literature.

The historical storyteller In her expansive and well-documented book The World of Storytelling (1990), Anne Pellowski traces the history of storytelling in world cultures from its first observable origins. As an essentially ‘oral’ and ancient practice, the history of storytelling can only come through traces found in text fragments and other early documentary evidence, a fact that serves to add to the mystery that surrounds this intriguing art. Storytelling, the practice of a storyteller (or group of storytellers) is a spontaneous and live art that is evidenced in a form in all cultures and traditions around the world but one whose traditional practices, at least in the industrialized West, are no longer as dominant.2 Pellowski notes that ‘early examples of stories or story fragments have been found in texts from ancient Babylonian, Canaanite, Hittite, Sumerian, Egyptian, Chinese and Sanskrit’3 but

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the first written account, which describes a scene where storytelling is practiced, has been found in Egypt ‘in the Egyptian Papyrus known as the Westcar Papyrus, recorded some time between the twelfth and eighteenth dynasties (2000–1300 bce)’.4 It describes an exchange of stories between Khufu (Cheops) and his sons who each tell a tale one after the other, all of which relate to each other, with the final story drawing a kind of conclusion. The first begins thus: ‘Know ye a man who can tell me tales of the deeds of magicians?’ Then the royal son Khafra stood forth and said, ‘I will thy Majesty tell a tale of the days of thy forefather Nebka . . .’5

This early example, curiously recorded through the technology of ‘writing’, reveals that even in these ancient times, ‘tales’, or stories, were told by ‘storytellers’ to an eager and receptive audience from which a reciprocal relationship between teller and listener was formed. Storytelling produced a chain of stories, a passing down of stories from one teller to a listener who, in turn, had the potential to retell the stories he heard therefore, creating the necessary conditions for the birth of ‘tradition’. Pellowski records other examples of storytelling, from the Hebrew Bible, Sanskrit and Buddhist scripture, and in early Greek writing–in the plays of Euripides, Aristophanes and the philosophical tracts of Aristotle and Plato–and on through pre-Christian and Latin literature, in Cicero, Pindar and Diodorus of Sicily who wrote on the bardic Gauls. The accounts from these texts in Pellowski’s study begin to paint a picture of the ritual involved in storytelling, its function and place in these early cultures and the importance and craft of the figure of the storyteller who performed the tales. Notably, what comes across from these early examples are certain key ideas that relate to the function and purpose of the storytelling in human cultures: its capacity to entertain, to console, to preserve memory but also to feed the imagination and to create the ‘new’, to instruct, to charm, delight and beguile, to surprise and to lead its listeners into the realms of the marvellous, that lie outside ‘strict’ versions of reality and move them into the fictional realm. But these functions of the storyteller’s art are only glimpses of a practice whose origins cannot be ‘truly’ known and whose essential function has spawned a number of theories. These include, as Pellowski summarizes: 1. That it grew out of playful, self-entertainment needs of humans. 2. That it satisfied the need to explain the surrounding physical world. 3. That it came about because of an intrinsic religious need in humans to honor or propitiate the supernatural force(s) believed to be present in the world.

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4. That it evolved from the human need to communicate experience to other humans. 5. That it fulfilled an aesthetic need for beauty, regularity and form through expressive language and music and body movement. 6. That it stemmed from the desire to record the actions or qualities of one’s ancestors or leaders, in the hope that this would give them a kind of immortality. 7. That it encoded and preserved the norms of social interaction that a given society lived by.6 Indeed, in all these theories we recognize the same functions in storytelling practices today, practices which have moved from purely oral modes into the written realm of literature, from story-teller to story-writer: so who, then, is the storyteller? And where can we find him? In the first instance, it is possible to recognize the storyteller in the tradition of the bard, which can be traced back to Homer and to the Homeric epic.7 In the figure of Homer we notice some of the first characteristics of the storyteller which are developed in storytellers through the ages. As Barbara Graziosi explains, the renowned storyteller of antiquity Homer in ‘The Hymn to Apollo’8 is depicted as a ‘traveller’ and an ‘old man’, the latter being a characteristic that ‘symbolised the antiquity and authority of his poems’.9 Moreover, Homer is not only described as a ‘singer’ but a divine singer, ‘Divine Homer’,10 a description which lends him further authority and establishes the relationship of poetry with the Gods – Homer is a ‘servant of the Muses’.11 In Homer we recognize not only the travelling storyteller who collects stories and disseminates them to other peoples, places and lands, but also the authority which comes from age experience and the wisdom of old. As well as the special power or gift of singing (poetry or wordsmithery), Homer is endowed with an otherworldly ability to communicate with muses who inspire him to access truths and speak them in a manner which is not accessible or possible for the ordinary person.12 Within the Homeric tradition, it is possible to observe the importance of a storytelling tradition that was based on a learnt but specific craft (art). This presents itself in the epic both through the importance of rhyme and metre, as well as through the reproduction of learnt formulae – Pellowski notes that the bard is characterized as a poetry, song and performance.13 As evidenced from early epic texts – which were constructed in predominantly oral cultures, and were performed to primary oral peoples14 – the concept of a learnt tradition, an art or craft, is therefore, perceptible, with the singer or storyteller being required to foster the ability to blend and retell stories within a chosen formula.

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In his seminal book on epic poetry, The Singer of Tales (1960), the Slavic scholar Albert B. Lord explains that the epic singers, bards or oral storytellers of these and subsequent oral epic traditions learn through ‘the process of imitation and of assimilation through listening and much practice on one’s own’.15 However, through the practice of their craft they also come to understand that the nature of the tradition is ‘fluid’.16 Lord, and his colleague and predecessor Milman Parry, studied the epic storytelling tradition as it existed in the Balkans in the early twentieth century in the Balkans in countries such as Serbia, Croatia and Albania, for example, where one could still find the old ‘singers of tales’ performing to the music of the lyre in remote mountain villages. Interestingly, not only did these epic singers learn among their many observations, this idea of a fluid tradition is important to note, as it provides useful insight into the way that the tradition has developed, stretching back across the centuries, arguably as far back as Homer. Lord explains that the epic tradition there is an emphasis on preservation of the truth of the song, with singers stressing that they have sung the songs exactly as their predecessor, although in reality the words they individually use have proven in fact to differ. However, he highlights that ‘what is of importance here is not the fact of exactness or lack of exactness, but the constant emphasis by the singer on his role in the tradition’, a role which can be described as ‘conserver of the tradition [. . .] defender of the historic truth of what is being sung’.17 Lord significantly notes that it is only when the singer ‘changes what he has heard in its essence’ that he ‘falsifies truth’.18 As a result, what we learn about the storyteller as personified by the epic singer is that there is no ‘conflict between the preserver of tradition and the creative artist’. Rather, what emerges is a picture of ‘the preservation of tradition by the constant re-creation of it. The ideal is a true story well and truly retold’.19 This bardic relative of the storyteller, as seen in the epic singers of tales, can be traced in various figures from classical antiquity through to the Middle Ages and up to the present day. He is found in a variety of cultures all around the world, in Europe, Russia, Asia, the Pacific Islands, in Aztec and Incan cultures of the Americas, and in Africa.20 For example, in Europe of the Middle Ages, we have the minstrel, who was, as Alfred Bates observes, ‘one of the most picturesque figures of medieval life’ who ‘inherited some features of the Roman historians and others of the bard of Gaul and Germany’.21 The later travelling minstrels or jongleurs perpetuated this tradition, and, often ‘at the bottom of the social scale [. . .] performed chansons in the vernacular’.22 Indeed, the minstrel’s close ancestors were the Germanic or Anglo-Saxon scop, the Scandinavian scald and the Celtic bard, who were all poets of the oral tradition in the Middle Ages23 and were performing their stories all around medieval Europe. As these figures were

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travellers, they could talk and draw on a variety of subjects and often told sagas and poems accompanied often by a harp.24 However, we also see the bard in the tradition of the troubadour or trouvère, a poet-composer-performer whose practice was more poetic and famously told tales of ‘courtly love’,25 and which spread from Provence to the north in the twelfth century.26 In the Russian and South Slavic traditions we find similar bards to those in Western Europe of the Middle Ages. Russian bards of this period were divided into the gusliari, veselÿe lyudi, the skomorokhi and the skaziteli.27 The differences between these bards was mainly in relation to where and to whom they performed but as Pellowski observes, ‘although the performances passed back and forth between the homes of royalty and the wealthy and the homes of the peasantry, the subjects of the stories remained essentially the same’.28 The veselÿe lyudi, literally, ‘joyous people’ were essentially entertainers, whereas the skomorokhi were more closely associated with wandering minstrels and street entertainers and could be found performing at weddings and festivals for example.29 The skomorokhi were not favoured by the Church authorities – Pellowski quotes a proverb that illustrates this: ‘skomorokh and priest are no comrades’ – as they were associated with ‘frivolous and pagan practices’ and were eventually wiped out by Alexis (father of Peter the Great) who passed a law against them in 1648.30 The bards of ancient Gaul were also lyric poets, following the traditions of other epic poets of antiquity who ‘accompanied by instruments resembling lyres, sing both praise and satire’.31 Interestingly, the bards of the Celtic tradition were known as ‘parasites (those who dine at another’s table). These poets recited their praises in large companies and crowds, and before each of the listeners according to rank’,32 but they were also of the same elevated social status as the druids and the seers.33 Indeed, the higher status which the bards enjoyed was partly due to the fact that the ancient Celtic tradition bardry also contained a spiritual element. As Arthur Rowan explains, ‘[t]he way of the bard is an ancient quest to understand the soul and bring about its growth. [. . .] The bards of old did this through poetry music and profound tales of myth and legend – languages that speak directly to the archetypes within.’34 Moreover, as did the Greeks, bards drew on the significance of gods and goddesses who acted as muses for their narrative inspiration. For example, we observe this through one of their deities, Brighid, who represented a number of key personas of the bard, and who, in turn, exhibited a number of functions: the storyteller, the poet and the enchanter and the healer. Arthur notes that, ‘[t]he bard as storyteller is the searcher of knowledge and keeper of lore. As poet, the bard participates in the high art of wordsmithing. The bard as enchanter is the ward of his people and

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the Otherworld. The bard is a healer of the spirit and soul.’35 Even today the practices of these Gaelic bards continue, and interestingly, as Thomas A. McKean explains, they are still noted for being tellers of ‘truth’ and for satirizing. Indeed, it was this attribute that led them to be kept at a distance by some, who ‘feared’ their power. McKean notes: The key common factor between the songs of old and those of the twentiethcentury song-poets is that [. . .] their composers [. . .] are considered tellers of truth by definition. [. . .] Gaelic culture has long placed a high premium on verbal dexterity, observation and quick wit, as a look at any collection of tongue twisters, proverbs, and anecdotes will show. Local song-makers were requested, indeed expected, to make songs both serious and satirical, for the local cèlidhean, songs of love and emotion, of local history, elegiac songs and biting satires that, without naming names, left no one in doubt as to who was being lampooned. Some locals would be wary of a bard lest he make a song about them, an echo of the tradition that an aoir, a satirical song or rhyme, could be socially damaging.36

In the figure of the Celtic bard we discover both the preserver and the seeker of knowledge, a figure who strives towards a truth which is not known through a craft or art. But there is also a supernatural, magical or spiritual element to the practice of bardic storytelling which heals spiritual and emotional wounds. In the later figures we find the function of a chronicler of events, the historian, in which we see not only the upholding of traditions, but also the preservation of historical memory, stories which move from histories to legends and epics of heroic deeds. Bards often upheld and sang the traditional stories of the gods, clans, kings, queens and gentry but we also see these satirized, questioned. The inheritors of the bardic tradition, the minstrels and troubadours, demonstrated how the storytellers told tales right across social spectrum, moving among humble peasantry but also performing in the courts of kings.37 As well as the history of kings and gentry, and the satires of political and social realities, we also see stories of the emotional life in the songs of love. Listeners were thus instructed on the moral and emotional lives that were played out according to societal norms. Stories and the storyteller, therefore, are clearly endowed with authority and power. Both the Celtic and Gaelic storytelling traditions are long-standing. Indeed, the Celtic and Gaelic bardic tradition continues today in the contemporary practice of balladeers, the stories of folk musicians and storytellers, or in traveller tales. Sometimes these storytellers sing their tales to their audiences accompanied by the traditional harp, but perhaps more likely today, the fiddle or the guitar,

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while at other times they simply tell their tales to their audiences throwing in some jokes and anecdotes for good measure – what the Irish famously call the crack (craic). In Britain, it is often in the Irish, Scottish and Welsh traditions that storytelling is still kept alive. James Delargy, who spent many years collecting tales from oral storytellers as the traditional practice declined, describes the storytellers as custodians of the oral tradition, highlighting this by telling a story of a dying storyteller expressing his relief that his stories had been written down and made secure before his death.38 Delargy’s description of the old storytellers as ‘walking libraries’39 is perhaps apt coming from the standpoint of a literate man, who lists the contents of their repertoire as including heroic tales, religious tales, fabliaux, conte-fables, collections of aphorisms and genealogies. Delargy describes how these tellers formed part of a local tradition which involved stories being passed on from father to son from generation to generation, but which was also renewed and supplemented by the stories of travellers and beggars who brought with them the lore of faraway places.40 There were several kinds of storytellers as well as singers who contributed to the tradition. The seanchaí was a man or woman who specialized in local tales such as family sagas, genealogies, social and historical traditions, folk prayers and short tales about fairies, ghosts and other supernatural beings. However, there were other lengthier and more significant tales told by the sgéaltórí, who, much like the bards above, relied on mnemonic devices and learnt synopses of their tales off by heart in order to be able to elaborate upon them in performance.41 The seanchas, or local narrative of various kinds was next in order of popularity followed by the nathaíocht or argument couched in verse, composed on the spot. Finally, there was the rianníocht, a general discussion of such things as current affairs and local genealogy. In any one evening, tellers of long tales, tellers of seanchas and singers would all perform.42 In this cross-section of Irish storytellers, therefore, we see that the content of their stories brought in a variety of narratives from social, political, historical and supernatural realities. Whatever form of tale these tellers told, the act of the storytelling performance united them all. Storytelling was traditionally told around the fire at night, and there was even a season for storytelling that began with the end of harvest and went through to mid-March. Stories were commonly told at various collective gatherings such as births, marriages and christenings, and other communal events such as quiltings, net-mending in fishing villages and at wool carding evenings.43 Very often these communal gatherings were conducted in the village storytelling house (toigh áirneáil)44 where, occasionally, visiting storytellers would come and tell tales for a nights’ lodging. In other words, storytelling

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here had a monetary as well as social value. Travellers would bring new stories into the melting pot of local lore, but they would also provide diverse material for the local storytellers to play with. Among these travelling storytellers then, one might find beggars, cattle drovers, carters, pedlars, farmers, labourers, itinerant school masters, friars, priests, soldiers, pilgrims, wise women, smugglers and poor scholars.45 Storytellers were everywhere: the everyman, who might appear in every type of person from every town and occupation. In these figures we witness not only the social and communal function of the storyteller, but also see the storyteller as community-builder, as someone who teaches others about faraway places, different cultures and traditions which would otherwise be unknown. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the storyteller as traveller is prevalent in the traveller community. In a recent book titled Scottish Traveller Tales: Lives Shaped through Stories (2002),46 the American folklorist, Donald Braid traces the tradition of storytelling in the traveller communities of Scotland. Braid explains how travellers would walk for miles to visit one another with the aim of exchanging stories.47 Braid asserts that, ‘stories and storytelling played a central role in social interaction’,48 so much so that it actually constituted a way of interacting. Braid explains how stories were mostly told around campfires, a practice that is still observed to this day, albeit now instead of the campfire we might see storytellers and audiences seated around a kitchen table or similar circular arrangement.49 Similarly, other traveller communities such as the Romani people that are spread across central and Eastern Europe in particular, are noted not only for the transmission of folktales from one place to another but also for their storytelling prowess.50 The storyteller was not only responsible for sending messages between one place and another, but was also crucial in that his stories were a means of provoking response. Stories, in other words, were expected to be questioned. Stories, therefore, transmitted knowledge from one place to another in ‘story form’ dialogically, which naturally expressed the communicativeness and communality of storytelling practice. These ancestors to the storyteller are equally visible in medieval and Renaissance literature. For example, in the European literary tradition there are instances of storytelling from ancient Greece through to the middle ages and right to the present day, echoing the figures of the bard and minstrel above. The storyteller appears in frame narratives such as Giovani Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1353). In the Decameron the seven young men and three young women that flee from plague-ridden Florence to a villa in the countryside fill their time with telling tales, each in turn claiming the role of storyteller. Their stories are spoken by each storyteller and are often didactic or instructive, imparting a form of

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wisdom: we hear tales of the power of fortune and power of human will; love tales that end tragically or happily; clever replies that save the speaker; tricks that women play on men or that men play on women; examples of virtue. Richard Kuhns, in his book Decameron and the Philosophy of Storytelling: Author as Midwife and Pimp (2005), suggests that story (as can be observed in Boccaccio’s Decameron) functions as ‘the means to philosophic wisdom’,51 a tradition which was inherited and was available to ‘the sensitive reader/hearer’.52 In this regard Kuhns proposes that Boccaccio regarded himself as a philosopherpoet a fact that he says can be inferred from his regard for the great poets of his tradition. As Dante joined his poet predecessors in limbo, so Boccaccio makes clear in his discussion, book 4 of the Genealogy, that poetry and philosophy are joined in the works of Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, and the ancient figures, both poets and philosophers, from whom they descend.53

Within the tradition of the storyteller-writer (here poet-philosopher) therefore, there is yet another reference to the past storytellers and a learnt-and-followed craft and tradition which has a purpose to fulfil. However, interestingly, in Boccaccio we also observe how the storyteller is conscious of the capacity of his art to question truth and in its contradictions. As Kuhns notes: Decameron, complex in its greater scope, develops its deeper thoughts out of several basic themes: that assumed ‘truths’ of religion can be challenges, that human action rests on contradictions unperceived by the one who acts, that storytelling has its own claim for truth [. . .] All serious storytelling relies on just such a set of claims [. . .] in its unfolding, truths that we can say are paradoxical because they are sometimes truth though false. A storyteller can be thought of as a liar yet one who tells the truth. [. . .] Boccaccio considered his vocation as being dedicated to just this paradox, and he was not alone in this belief, for it is shared by all storytellers.54

This paradoxical status of the storyteller – as one who occupies a zone in which the distinction of truth from fiction is often difficult – is inherent to his nature or function, an aspect which, as we shall see, is highlighted in the readings of the novels in this book. Similarly, we encounter the storyteller in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1386–95) as each of the pilgrims depicted in late fourteenth-century text in turn becomes a storyteller. Significantly, these tales are written in the spoken dialect and are always performed in front of a real, diverse and often interactive

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audience. The varieties of tales we hear all have different messages and purposes. Some are humorous and some serious, some tell of love, others of greed; some draw on romance, on the sermon and others on fables and illusion. We see the storyteller moving between all the characters in the pilgrimage: in the wistful figure of wife of Bath who instructs us in the art of marriage; in the Miller’s drunken yet entertaining banter, in the Knight’s tale of romantic love. In his extremely insightful book Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling (1988), Leonard Koff highlights a number of key aspects of the practice of Chaucer’s art which situates him within the tradition of storytellers and storytelling as opposed to the (more modern) conception of authorship, and as such, gives us a deeper insight into the function of the medieval storyteller-cum-writer. Koff explains that for Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales sit within a tradition of re-telling of ‘old stories’, and that the Chaucer is indeed a performer and public servant, whose manuscript (collection of stories) are ‘community property’.55 Koff explains that ‘[r]etelling an original story does not in theory distort the original. It recovers it and makes it public (present) and useful, useful for the audience who will come to hear it performed, or perform it.’56 Retelling is a means of preservation a ‘keye of remembraunce’57 not just for the storyteller but communally for his audience of listeners who are asked to ‘read with him’,58 in other words, who participate and collaborate in the storytelling performance (echoing, of course, the traditional singing of epic poetry alluded to above). As such, another key aspect of Chaucer’s art is found in a focus on performance which is demonstrated by the way Chaucer’s texts are constructed in such a way as to evoke community and to express the communality of a shared story experience. This, Koff argues, is achieved through ‘devices such as facial expressions, hand gestures, and body motions which animate what is being read’, which move us to see Chaucer less as an author than as performer whose narrative is constructed ‘to be socially accommodat[ing to] the many persons in each reader, the socially flexible self, rather than the romantic uniqueness (“privetee”)’.59 It is, therefore, not only the content of the stories which are there to instruct, amuse and enlighten us, but equally the performance of storytelling which involves the embodied storyteller communicating to an audience. Throughout the history of literature we find the storyteller reflected in the text, the close relationship between the writer and the storyteller, and the awareness of the text and story as a communally constructed and shared experience. From these early medieval texts, we see the beginnings of the tradition of the fairytale genre, which Jack Zipes traces as moving from frame narratives such as The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and later collections such as Giambattista

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Basile’s Il Pentamerone (1634) where fairy-tale motifs and structures are apparent.60A closer look at the history of some of the stories in these collections reveals a complex web of storytellers, all of whom have contributed to the survival of the tales. For example, the history of the Cinderella tale, believed to have originated in China in the first century, reveals the importance of both the oral and writerly storyteller to its survival. In Europe, an early written version of the story titled ‘The Cat Cinderella’61 appears in Il Pentamerone (1634–6), one of the first collections of European folktales. As Alan Dundes explains, this collection was originally titled Lo Cunto de li Cunte, ‘The Tale of Tales’, and was written in an oral Neapolitan dialect. The use of the spoken dialect in this written text very much situates it in an oral storytelling milieu rather than a literate one, and highlights the dynamic relationship between the oral and written word. Significantly, its form was also indicative of its design for oral delivery and performance as it consisted of five sets of ten stories with each set representing one day’s worth of telling, which echo the storytellers discussed above. In the later European tradition moving into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we recognize the storyteller in the tellers of fairy tales (which became known as ‘the literary fairy tale’62) that were collected and transcribed by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault in their famous fairy-tale collections. Although not always immediately brought to mind, beyond and behind these stories there is always a teller. In fact, the practice of storytelling according to Zipes can be defined both by ‘telling a tale to an audience without depending on the written word, or it might be seen as taking the printed words from a book and giving them life and reading them orally to one or more listeners.’63 We might imagine the figure of the old grandmother spinning her yarns, the fairy godmother or the fictional storyteller, Old Mother Goose herself, who personifies these ‘mother’ storytelling figures, imparting wisdom to children.64 In the telling of fairy tales we also become storytellers ourselves without realizing it. Every time a parent reads a fairy tale to a child, they, in turn, take on this role, but children also learn first through telling and listening to stories. As Richard Kuhns notes, ‘Mothers are usually children’s first storytellers, establishing the language to enter the realm of cultural reality. [. . .] What is interesting about the storyteller and storyhearer in their relationship to story is that a cultural form is established.’65 In the telling of folk- and fairy tales, we see the storytelling tradition as a teacher of mankind from childhood onwards. Its opening and closing formula of ‘once upon a time’ and ‘happily ever

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after’ finds its equivalent in all languages, demonstrating the translatability of story and its ability to transgress cultural constraints. In the European imagination, the image of the Oriental storyteller, in part fuelled by The Arabian Nights (or The Thousand and One Nights) which reached European audiences in the late eighteenth century, can still be glimpsed in the bazaars and squares of many Arab countries where the tradition continues to thrive. For example, the bustling central square of Jemaa el Fna and the souk in Marrakech are places where travellers can still spot local people gathering to listen to traditional storytellers vying for the audiences’ attention. In a travel book by Elias Canetti titled The Voices of Marakkesh: A Record of a Visit (1978), Canetti describes a sighting of a storyteller and the impact that he made on him. They were words that held no meaning for me, hammered out with fire and impact: the man who spoke them they were precious and he was proud of them. He arranged them in a rhythm that always struck me as highly personal. If he paused, what followed came out all the more forceful and exalted. I sensed the solemnity of certain words and the devious intent of others. Flattering compliments affected me as if they had been directed at myself; in perilous situations I was afraid. Everything was under control; the most powerful words flew precisely as far as the storyteller wished them to.66

The figure of the storyteller commands attention and exudes a form of authority. Although the stories are not his own, he nonetheless temporarily acquires and exudes authority through the performance or telling of his story. Canetti’s description of the storyteller here recalls the tradition of the tales of nameless storytellers which culminates in the collection known as The Thousand and One Nights, another example of a collection of frame tales that reflects the shift of practice from oral to written modes. Robert Irwin’s excellent companion to the Nights documents the history of the storyteller in the Arabian world. While the minstrels and troubadours were singing their way around Europe, the Arab equivalents were touching the shores from Spain across North Africa and into the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Similarly, their tales varied from high to low culture, from court entertainers to street storytellers of low social status who told to illiterate audiences as a form of entertainment. Storytellers that Irwin mentions include the Turkish storyteller the meddah, found particularly in Turkish courts, who was a descendant of the ashik (‘lover’), a poet-minstrel who similarly wandered through the early Ottoman

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empire singing or reciting poems about love and heroism. However, the meddah did not always occupy a high status and was also found telling tales in coffeehouses using a wand and a handkerchief as props. The ancient Persian bard, the gosan was characterized as a ‘euologist, satirist, storyteller, musician, recorder of past achievements and commentator of his own times’.67 In medieval Persia, the naqqal (‘transmitter’) was the court storyteller of the great national epic the Shahnama (‘The Book of Kings’) (c. 907–1010 ce), but sometimes could not resist the temptation of telling secular stories and so doubled up as a rowzeh khan.68 The contemporary relatives of the bardic minstrels of Central Asian countries such as Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia improvise more and add a performative aspect to pure recitation. Kazakh bards acqyn or dsyrsy perform in a singing dual, a practice that is also observed in the eisteddfod in Wales.69 Ancient bardism in India was also very influential and often contained religious elements, although later bards were also secular. For example, the Bengali kathak or reciter, specifically left out any religious spiritual or philosophical commentary as he felt ‘it would not be understood by his listeners’ and often added to his tales, a bit of ‘local folklore, a popular legend, or even a bit of vulgar humour’.70 On the other hand, bards who recited tales from the Ramayana (400 bc–200 ad)71 or the Mahabharata (400 bc–400 ad)72 which depicted both gods and heroes, would blend both religious and secular stories, such as the kalamkari bards of Andhra Pradesh.73 Religious storytelling practices were common in a variety of religions across Southern and Eastern Asia: Hindu, Jain, Sikh and Buddhist storytelling. In the Hindu religion, for example, storytellers persist to the present day, combining religious teachings and folklore.74 Early practices of Hindu storytelling, for example, were performed by a special caste of storytellers known as chakkiyars outside temples, who also had a special building for this practice called the kuttumbalam.75 Other religious storytellers such as the Brahmanical teachers and the yamapattaka sometimes also used pictures to tell stories that had a moralistic tone.76 Buddhist storytelling, was practiced in China, Korea and Japan and tales which could be fictionalized were preferred, with some practices adopted from Indian literature, such as the mixture of prose and verse.77 In the Chinese tradition, the role of storyteller and his art of storytelling (shuouha) has been traced back to the first-century Song dynasty (960–1279) and has spawned a tradition which continues to this day.78 Interestingly, the Chinese oral tradition of storytelling was not born out of a primary oral culture but existed side-by-side with the literate one. Vibeke Børdahl has shown how these two arts, oral and written one considered low culture and the other high,

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have influenced each other, to the point where the storyteller often appears in simulated form in the Chinese novel, giving it an element of the vernacular.79 Often encircled by a captive audience, the storyteller is a performer who, by blending various oral arts and gestures, strives to keep his audience listening. The storyteller is very much a part of the culture and the narratives that he tells are often both culturally specific and universally translatable. Another place where we might find the storyteller is in cultures that have low literacy levels where the oral tradition takes on the function of both history and memory of the tribe. In many countries on the African continent, the role of storyteller is taken by the griot or jeli, a West African travelling poet and musician who combines the role of storyteller and historian. Echoing the European bards discussed earlier, traditionally griots were court musicians who sang praise to the leaders of the tribe, thereby telling the history of the region. Even today, the griots still perform the function of keepers of history in many West African communities and can be both men and women (griottes).80 A storehouse of oral traditions, the griot is still found singing the history of a tribe or family at naming ceremonies, weddings and other social and religious occasions. This focus on the storyteller as a history-teller, relates to another of the characteristics of the storyteller which we see echoed in many of the figures above. Many indigenous peoples of colonized lands often also retain storytellers and ancient storytelling traditions. The various tribes that are known most commonly as ‘Native Americans’ in the United States, and ‘First Nations’ in Canada, still have an active storytelling culture. Often, the role of storyteller in these traditions can be appropriated by individuals within the tribe whose job it is to remember its collective stories, which often constitute an imaginative and symbolic history. Although the storytellers might be distinct, they share the employment of a variety of techniques and methods, which signal their role as storyteller, and all of which reflect once again the act of performance. As Rodney Frey explains, among the various styles and techniques exhibited by storytellers are the use of repetition of key phrases to signal key actions within the narrative, the singing of associated songs during the telling of the narrative, the dramatic use of intonation and pauses, the accentuation of body movement and hand gesturing, and [. . .] action.81

The voice and body become instruments in the telling of the tale and part of the storytelling performance. As such, performance and the use of the physical body are integral to the storyteller’s art.

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On the other side of the world, in New Zealand for example, the Maori also have a strong culture of storytelling and often the members of the tribe would meet and exchange their stories in a meeting house which echoes the practices of the Irish storytellers and the Hindu storytellers described earlier. As Brian Fagan notes, these storytellers not only preserved the history of the tribe but were of such great import that Maori storytellers risked life-threatening outcomes if they lacked skill at their craft.82 Similarly, for the indigenous peoples of Australia, storytelling was a necessary and integral part of their culture and was the means from which all forms of knowledge (history, religion, spirituality, genealogy) was passed down from generation to generation, from elders to children. The storytellers were the custodians of stories, the keepers of a whole tradition of lore some of which has now been forgotten. Significantly, these storytellers do not tell about their individual lives, but always convey their stories so that they could be understood and applicable to the collective. Stories then can be told as parables, myths or allegories, representational stories that impart a wisdom that is beneficial for the community to learn from. For these indigenous tribes, storytelling practices are often performed as ceremonial acts which can have religious significance.83 As a result, storytellers are often associated with religious teachers, priests, prophets, sages or shamans. These storytellers are responsible for teaching of spiritual truths through story. In a study of Siberian Shamanism, Kira Van Deusen explains that ‘oral storytelling is the way shamans themselves convey spiritual truth’.84 Moreover, she goes on to explain that these stories are important not only because they relay new ways of looking at the word, but also in that the act of listening to them can bring about spiritual growth for both the listener and the teller, a capacity which we saw echoed in the Celtic storytellers of the Middle Ages. Van Deusen notes that the way a storyteller chooses the tales, the details added or removed, the tone – all of these make storytelling a spiritual act. Stories and songs are not objects or artefacts but living beings.85

The characteristics found in the aboriginal cultures in particular point to storytelling as an epistemological tool, a way of knowing the world. Moreover, the turn to prophecy and to spiritual truths also links the storyteller to power and magic. The characteristic set up here, is that the storyteller becomes a powerful figure that not only imparts knowledge but also crucially imparts wisdom and prophecy.

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In Pellowski’s study on storytelling in the world, she devotes a whole chapter on ‘religious storytelling’, tracing this form of storytelling in a variety of religions: Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Sufism.86 Often these oral storytellers used pictures to accompany their stories, such as the yamapattaka storytellers of the Hindu tradition, who are prevalent as early as the seventh century, telling stories about the Underworld, pointing to pictures drawn on long scrolls.87 In fact, religious storytelling which employed pictures, can be found in various ‘eastern’ religions such as Buddhism and this was practised in temples in China and Japan. In the Christian tradition, as Leland Ryken has argued, the Bible can be seen as a form of storytelling and Jesus himself as a storyteller, and we can trace characteristics of oration, prophecy and teaching in the New Testament stories in particular.88 Pellowski also mentions scholars who have argued that the Bible has roots in oral narration, implying that the stories were circulated in oral form before their written versions.89 But oral storytelling was practiced in the Christian religion outside the liturgy, and the church, from early times in the form of parables and moral tales, whose modern form can be seen in Sunday school movements.90 In sum, the storyteller, historically acts as the medium through which knowledge is passed on, but crucially this knowledge is not ‘divided’ into grand narratives of historical progression, functioning rather as a story which is pervasive, extending into unexpected ways into a multiplicity of discourses. With each guise, we determine that it is in the storyteller’s nature to be constantly evasive: he does not rest in one stable figure, or even gender. He is not an individual, but a voice that ‘speaks’ a message. The storyteller flits between the poles of good and evil; never stable, we cannot really place him or clearly pinpoint his message. We see the storyteller as a wise woman, seductress, magician, holy man, teacher and instructor, and also liar, devil, trickster, cheat. This move between truth and lies, fiction and knowledge, is the paradox but also the power of the storyteller. His art encompasses dualities and brings them together through story. Although, my examination here is by no means exhaustive, it nevertheless offers a clear vision of the historical and cultural pervasiveness of the storyteller, the travelling figure who crosses the border of numberless villages, towns and cities, existing across realms, lands, nations and empires. The storyteller is a figure to whom any country and no country may lay claim. This fact offers one reason why, in talking about the storyteller, we almost unavoidably talk in generalizations, and why, even as we give definition to the shadowy but pervasive presence of this figure, we remain aware of something incomplete and beyond our reach. For the story of the storyteller is, in an important sense, still being told.

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Notes 1 ‘Oxford English Dictionary Online’ (2nd edn. 1989; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 10 October 2006. . 2 Storytelling arguably, still comes to us through a variety of different media that surround us in our daily lives. What I am referring to here specifically is the art of the oral storyteller as a traditional practice. I discuss the storytelling revival in the West, in Chapter 2. See also Patrick Ryan, ‘The Contemporary Storyteller in Context: A Study of Storytelling in Modern Society’. Dissertation (University of Glamorgan, 2003). 3 Anne Pellowski, The World of Storytelling (Expanded and rev. edn; Bronx: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1990), 3. 4 Ibid. 5 ‘Tales of the Magicians’, in Epiphanius Wilson (ed. and trans.) Egyptian Literature: Comprising Egyptian Tales, Litanies, Invocations, The Book of the Dead and Cuneiform Writings (New York; London: The Colonial Press, 1901), 160. Qtd in Pellowski, World of Storytelling, 3–4. 6 Pellowski, World of Storytelling, 10. 7 Pellowski notes that the earliest known depiction of the bard is not only found in Homer but also in the Sanskrit scripture. See Pellowski, World of Storytelling, 21. 8 One of the Homeric Hymns to various gods. For the text of ‘The Hymn to Apollo’ see ‘Hymn to Apollon’ in Apostolos N. Athanassakis (ed.), The Homeric Hymns. 2nd edn (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2004), 14–27. 9 Barbara Graziosi, Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 67. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 The notion of ‘inspiration’ as Timothy Clark documents, appears in Plato ‘in fragment 18 of the Democritus in the sixth century bc’ and is described by Plato as a kind of ‘possession’, as a ‘divine madness’ and as an ‘old story’. As Clark suggests, this is perhaps where the link between divine madness and poetic inspiration is established. Clark describes how the poetic process involved a submission of the poet of his psyche ‘to voices overlapping, interacting and weaving themselves together and becoming internalized in the automatism of mnemonic technique’. It is the ‘Muses in Homer [who] are inseparable from the authority of tradition and memory in an oral tradition [and] verses, in its capacity of mnemonic, is the very medium of cultural transmission, the sole guarantor of mediation between the ephemeral or immediate and the general life, history and posterity in the

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13 14

15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25

26

27 28 29

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community.’ Significantly, it is ‘verse, in pre-literate Greece’, that is ‘not only the bearer of epics but [the bearer] of any message of importance’. For a discussion of Homeric notions of inspiration or to explore the notion of inspiration further see Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 41. Pellowski, World of Storytelling, 21. This description is taken from Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, where he differentiates between primary and secondary orality. Primary being, without the technology of writing. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 24. Milman Parry and Albert Lord famously began their investigations on these Slavic singers in the 1930s where they visited various remote places all around the Balkans tracing and recording their songs. For more recent transcriptions and generally a look at existing oral traditions and how they are interpreted by academic scholars, see ‘The Centre for Studies of the Oral Tradition’ at (http://oraltradition.org/). Lord, The Singer of Tales, 24. Ibid., 28. Ibid. Ibid. For a complete history of the bard in all these cultures, see Pellowski, World of Storytelling, chapter 2, 21–43. Alfred Bates ed., The Drama: Its History, Literature and Influence on Civilization. Vol. 7 (London: Historical Publishing Company, 1903), 4. Evan Alderson, Robin Blaser and Harold G. Coward, eds. Reflections on Cultural Policy: Past, Present and Future (Wilfrid Laurier University Press for The Calgary Institute for the Humanities, 1993), 60. Ibid., 61. Pellowski, World of Storytelling, 28. For an introduction to the troubadours that traces the development of this figure through medieval Europe, see Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, The Troubadours: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Alderson, Blaser and Coward, Reflections on Cultural Policy, 61. Pellowski contests the description of troubadours as storytellers, saying that they performed ‘lyric verse’ and did not really relate ‘narratives’. She notes that there is confusion among scholars on this issue. See Pellowski, World of Storytelling, 30. Pellowski, World of Storytelling, 31. Ibid. Ibid.

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30 Ibid., 34. 31 John T. Koch, Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABCClio, 2006), 169. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Arthur Rowan, The Lore of the Bard: A Guide to the Celtic and Druid Mysteries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 1. 35 Rowan, The Lore of the Bard, 239. 36 Thomas A. McKean, ‘Tradition and Modernity: Gaelic Bards in the Twentieth Century’, in Ian Brown (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature: Vol 3. Modern Transformations: New Identities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 130. 37 Proinsias Mac Cana, ‘Irish Literary Tradition’, in Brian Ó Cúiv (ed.), A View of the Irish Language (Dublin: Stationary Office, 1969), 45. 38 James H. Delargy, The Gaelic Storyteller: The Sir John Rhys Memorial Lecture of the British Academy (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1945), 20. 39 Ibid., 8. 40 As I will be discussing below in the section on Walter Benjamin, the traveller and stay-at home storyteller are representative of Benjamin’s two archaic types of storyteller. 41 Delargy, The Gaelic Storyteller, 33. 42 See Irene Lucchetti, ‘Islandman Translated: Tomás O’Crohan, Autobiography and the Politics of Culture’. Dissertation (University of Wollongong, 2005). 43 Delargy, The Gaelic Storyteller, 19. 44 Ibid. 45 Lucchetti, ‘Islandman Translated’, 67. 46 Donald Braid, Scottish Traveller Tales: Lives Shaped through Stories (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002). 47 Ibid., 56. 48 Ibid., 58. 49 Ibid., 56 and 64. 50 T. A. Acton and Gary Mundy, Romani Culture and Gypsy Identity: A Companion Volume to ‘Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity’ (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997), 21. 51 Richard Francis Kuhns, Decameron and the Philosophy of Storytelling: Author as Midwife and Pimp (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2005), 19. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 18. 55 Leonard Michael Koff, Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling (London: University of California Press, 1988), 37.

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72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79

80

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Ibid., 39. Ibid., 42. Ibid. Ibid., 43. Jack Zipes, The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xx. For a history of the story of Cinderella, see Alan Dundes, Cinderella: A Casebook (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). For more on the history of the ‘literary fairy tale’ see Zipes, The Oxford Companion, xx. Ibid., 501. For an interesting history of the Mother Goose figure see Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde. Chapters 4 and 5. Kuhns, Decameron and the Philosophy of Storytelling, 17. Elias Canetti and James Amery Underwood, The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit (London: Boyars: Distributed by Calder and Boyars, 1978), 78. Pellowski, World of Storytelling, 35. See Chapter 4: Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2004), 103–19. Pellowski, World of Storytelling, 36. Ibid., 37. Exact dating for this collection of tales is debated by scholars. This dating comes from the following source, which also discusses the history of the Ramayana in more detail. See Radhey Shyam Chaurasia, History of Ancient India: Earliest Times to 1000 A.D. (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2008), 50. See above source for more information on the Mahabharata. Ibid. Pellowski, World of Storytelling, 37. For a study on Hindu teaching and storytelling, see Kirin Narayan, Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching. Contemporary Ethnography Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). Pellowski, World of Storytelling, 46. Ibid. Ibid., 53. See Vibeke Børdahl, ‘The Storyteller’s Manner in Chinese Storytelling’, Asian Folklore Studies 62 (2003): 66. For a study of Chinese storytelling, see Vibeke Børdahl, The Eternal Storyteller: Oral Literature in Modern China (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999) and The Oral Tradition of Yangzhou Storytelling (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996). For more information on the history and function of the griot in West Africa, see Thomas A. Hale, Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) and Scribe, Griot and Novelist: Narrative Interpreters of the Songhay Empire (Orlando; London: University of Florida Press, 1990).

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81 Rodney Frey, ‘Oral Traditions’, in Thomas Biolsi (ed.), A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians. (2004 1st edn; Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 162. 82 Brian M. Fagan, Clash of Cultures (2nd edn; Walnut Creek, CA; London: AltaMira Press, 1998), 273. 83 For a study on the indigenous peoples of Australia which includes information about their storytelling practices, see Ronald Murray. Berndt, World of the First Australians (Rev. edn; Sydney, Australia: Lansdowne Press, 1982). 84 Kira Van Duesen, The Flying Tiger: Women Shamans and Storytellers of the Amur (Kingston, ON: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2001), xvii. 85 Duesen, The Flying Tiger, xvii. 86 Pellowski, World of Storytelling, 44–65. 87 Ibid., 46. 88 Leland Ryken, How to Read the Bible as Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Academie Books, 1984). 89 Pellowski, World of Storytelling, 57. 90 Ibid., 61.

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Reading and Writing the Storyteller

A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even a man reading one shares this companionship. Benjamin, Illuminations, 100 The year was 1936, it was the eve of the Second World War, while Adolf Hitler was opening the eleventh Olympic Games in Berlin, Walter Benjamin was already far from his hometown, in exile. This was the year that Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’ was published, an essay which stood tenuously at the end of the nineteenth-century literary tradition of the novel and marked the beginning of the twentieth-century revival in critical practice. He begins, ‘Familiar though his name may be to us, the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force. He has already become something remote from us and something that is getting ever more distant.’1 Considering the importance of the storyteller to the preservation of cultural memory, his integral function in communities and his continuous presence throughout history, one might have expected at least a raised eyebrow from subsequent critics on being told that the storyteller had all but left the stage. However, as nineteenth-century novelistic practices were moving into twentieth-century ones, from realist to modernist (or even ‘high’ modernist) modes, this idea was not so difficult to swallow. Perhaps this explains, in part, why Benjamin’s essay went on to exert so grand an influence on subsequent readings and theorizations of the novel, an influence whose legacy continues to this day. However, this does not fully explain why it is not until very recently, by critics such as Ivan Kreilkamp, that Benjamin’s premise has not been more sufficiently questioned.

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It is from this starting point that I begin my investigation of the storyteller in criticism. I begin with a questioning and rethinking of Benjamin’s account of the novelist’s rise to power. What was it about Benjamin’s essay that relegated the storyteller to an archaic oral past, and saw the novelist, albeit ‘isolated’ and ‘uncounselled’, sitting at the helm as preserver of cultural memory? Indeed, was Benjamin correct to position the novelist and the storyteller thus, and to what extent does his essay have relevance today?

Interpreting Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ is an essay that has had an enormous influence on the theory of the novel. However, its readership has moved beyond literary or even cultural critics and its implications have been applied to areas of medical science such as psychiatry and psychology and to the study of narratives of illness in the medical humanities. Indeed, its broader influence has been so wide-reaching that it would be difficult to properly map its reach: from specific readings, to applications in light of specific theories of narrative or specific writers or periods, to singular quotations, ‘The Storyteller’ has enjoyed over 60 years of critical readership, and its popularity is still everywhere in evidence. Part philosophical musing, part cultural criticism, part literary criticism, one can see how the essay appeals, as well as how it opens itself to multiple interpretation; surprisingly though and in spite of this variety, Benjamin’s underlying premise – that the storyteller has all but disappeared – is still taken as a given. If we approach the essay, however, as a contemporary literary critical reader, divested of preconceptions, we might assume from the full title – ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’– that its main thesis is a presentation of the relationship of Leskov to the figure of the storyteller: in other words, of the writer to the storyteller. Up to a point, our assumptions would not be far off the mark: but these are neither its immediate nor its unambiguous concerns. Indeed, before the relationship between Leskov and the storyteller can begin, let alone become established, the distancing project that Benjamin launches in the opening lines is further stressed as both Leskov and the storyteller move deeper into the shadows. He states: ‘To present someone like Leskov as a storyteller does not mean bringing him closer to us but, rather, increasing our distance from him.’2 In this sense, Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ begins with the end of a practice with his presentation of Leskov as storyteller serving indeed as a presentation of Leskov as the last storyteller. For the essay moves into larger musings that see

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both Leskov and the storyteller he represents as symbolic of a grander project. It is this symbolic interpretation of the essay, and its overall message which has been the focus of critical attention. Nevertheless, the fact remains that within the essay, there is something in Leskov as writer which permits an identification with the storyteller, and thus, we could conclude that, a writer can be a storyteller; and as such, it is simply then a matter of finding out how this is achieved according to Benjamin and whether these constructs could be used to ‘find’ the storyteller again. The question, therefore, moves from whether a writer can be a storyteller to: why is Leskov the last storyteller? What characteristics does Benjamin attribute to Leskov which may no longer be present in future writers? Moreover, if other writers presented these characteristics, could they too (other writers – pre- or post-1895) achieve ‘storytellerhood’? Initially, as mentioned earlier, although the essay sets out to present how Leskov as a writer follows in the tradition of the storyteller, after the first paragraph, Leskov is scarcely mentioned and the essay reads more like a eulogy to the storyteller with Leskov poised as an instantiation of the figure of the storyteller and his dying art: The art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.3

Indeed, in the paragraphs that follow and that end the first section, in what becomes a distinctly prophetic register, we are offered, not the expected exegesis of Leskov’s position as storyteller, but instead a warning which resonates with almost mystical4 portent and whose dark shadow looms heavily over the essay as a whole. For, contained in the figure of the storyteller and his art of storytelling, Benjamin identifies a phenomenon that was so profound that it marked ‘the end of not only the external world but of the modern world as well’.5 This hyperbolic claim informs much of the essay that follows, suggesting that an essay ostensibly on Leskov and ‘the storyteller’ is, in fact, illustrative of a larger and more sinister phenomenon, one that could be described as alternating between the poles of terrifying portent and yearning nostalgia. It is precisely the possibility of seemingly contradictory inference which leads critics along diverging pathways in their interpretation of the essay. Do we abandon our search for the storyteller as represented in Leskov and instead read the essay as cultural criticism, read its

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message as a possible foreshadowing of that breakdown of cultural solidarity and fracturing of belief systems that ushered in the Second World War? Or do we, as Benjamin goes on to profess, see the essay in symbolic terms, as representative of the rise of modernity which has finally wrenched the storyteller away from his long-established place of prominence in the preservation of cultural memory? In short, how do we read ‘The Storyteller’? The fact that Benjamin’s essay is ambiguous is nothing new to critics who are familiar with the rest of his oeuvre. As Esther Leslie observes, Benjamin’s writing is noted for its ambiguities, a detail that, she says, has led him to be seen as ‘a schizophrenic writer, sometimes materialist, sometimes mystical (and) in some ways falling apart and showing contradictory interests’.6 Susan Sontag too sees this ambiguity as a singular property of Benjamin’s writing style, remarking that ‘in Benjamin’s texts sentences do not seem to generate in the ordinary way; they do not lead gently into one another, and do not even create an obvious line of reasoning.’7 To determine ‘a reasoned’ thesis on what characteristics may qualify Leskov as storyteller, therefore, one would not expect to arrive without some ‘difficulties’. However, in spite of the ambiguities in Benjamin’s essay, on closer inspection, at least in terms of understanding, the key functions and characteristics of the figure of the storyteller hold ground. The following four sections of the essay concentrate on establishing who the storyteller is and how we might understand him. Interestingly, a re-examination of Benjamin’s essay in the light of the history of the storyteller reveals, in a compelling fashion, that many of the characteristics that Benjamin attributes to the storyteller are present and traceable to the transhistorical and transcultural figure that we examined in Chapter 1. For example, Benjamin classifies the storyteller into two archaic types: one that is embodied in ‘the tiller of the soil’, ‘the master craftsman’ or ‘peasant’ who personifies the local and specific storyteller that knows the history of the tribe; and the other is embodied in ‘the trading seaman’, ‘the traveling journeyman’ or wanderer who moves from one place to another bringing to indigenous peoples tales from afar. We see echoes of the travelling journeyman in Homer and in the bardic tradition more generally, from the Celtic bard to the traveller communities of Europe, all of whom bring with them ‘the lore of faraway places’.8 We see the tiller of the soil or local storyteller in the many storytellers of indigenous tribes, who tell the ‘lore of the past’, and in the telling of ‘histories’. Both these types, however, share similar and fundamental characteristics which resonate in the various storyteller figures throughout the ages. The storyteller is a figure that belongs to an ‘oral tradition’ of storytelling, who performs his stories

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to a living audience, ‘a community of listeners’.9 Benjamin stresses the role of memory in the preservation of story and in the continuation of tradition but also, as fundamental to this, he reminds us that the storyteller’s art is one of ‘repeating’ and ‘retelling’10 stories. In terms of the origins of the stories that the storyteller tells, we are told that the storyteller draws from his own and others’ experiences in order to craft his tales. Hence, he is a figure that approaches the ‘historian’ or ‘chronicler’, figures who are both driven to tell in order to retain the ‘memory’11 of a story past, one that includes personal and communal histories. This characteristic of the storyteller as historian, of preserver of cultural and historical memory, was present in a wide variety of storyteller figures from the bard to the minstrel in Europe, to the griot in Africa and meddah in Central and Western Asia. Benjamin stresses the idea of ‘craftsmanship’ as a quality of the storyteller, and classes it an artisan practice. In this way, he recognizes that storytelling is also an ‘art’ which has to be learnt through what he calls listening to ‘the rhythm of the work’.12 In this aspect we are reminded of the Salvic epic singers of tales, and their bardic ancestors who sang in verse and rhyme. Indeed, Benjamin mentions the ‘epic’ over a dozen times throughout the essay, asserting and reasserting the ancestry of the storyteller and its long history. As well as the notion of poetry and rhythm in storytelling, we are also reminded of the performative aspects of storytelling practices, with Benjamin stressing the importance of the ‘sensory aspect’ of storytelling which he says ‘is by no means a job for the voice alone’.13 In this way, the body is brought into the storytelling practice, ‘the soul, the eye and the hand’14 which we recognize again in all the storyteller performances of marketplaces and courts, taverns and pubs, throughout the ages. Benjamin also highlights some of the functions of the storyteller in the practice of his art. As a teller of ‘fairy tales’, the storyteller is ‘the first tutor to children’ and ‘to mankind’.15 In various cultures, as we observed, this was precisely the case. But even more than this, Benjamin recognizes the ‘wisdom’ of the storyteller with which he approaches the ‘sage’ and the wise man and the prophet. Indeed, when tracing the storyteller through different countries and traditions, these aspects that Benjamin recalls, seem to be universally ‘true’ of his nature. Benjamin’s portrait of the archetypal storyteller, therefore, is an arguably intimate yet accurate portrayal of the function and characteristics of this figure. If Benjamin has been accused of mythologizing16 the storyteller, it is because the storyteller already carries with him his own mythology. The point is: can this mythology continue to be preserved in new storyteller figures? And how do these characteristics map onto the figure of the writer, in Leskov?

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A literal reading of the essay proves difficult and this brings us back to expectations of contemporary critical practice. If we approach the essay with the aim of looking for clear and reasoned arguments or justifiable statements in relation to how we might read the characterizations of the storyteller as represented by Leskov, then the essay ultimately fails to convince. For example, early in the essay, Benjamin claims that a storyteller always draws on ‘experience [. . .] passed on from mouth to mouth’.17 This seems simple enough: the storyteller collects his stories from oral sources, from other storytellers or tellers. However, relating this to the writer, he qualifies this line with the claim that, ‘among those who have written down the tales, it is the great ones whose written version differs least from the speech of the many nameless storytellers.’18 This second statement cannot, of course, be taken literally. There has been no exact literary project to date that transcribes word for word how an oral storyteller tells a story; in fact, this would not be classed as literature. The fundamental differences between oral and written stories do not need to be spelled out here; if there is a train of argument concerning the identification or recognition of a storyteller in a writer, then it is far from obviously stated in Benjamin’s essay. Indeed, Leskov was fundamentally a writer, and not an oral storyteller. Although there may ultimately be an argument as to why we could see him sharing characteristics with this figure, the idea of a literal transcription or near transcription of oral speech is not what Benjamin has in mind. In a later assertion, Benjamin correctly recognizes the crucial difference between oral and written modes, the practice of the oral storyteller and the writer of ‘novels’. He says: ‘The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes the novel from the story [. . .] is its essential dependence on the book.’19 However, on closer analysis, this statement again poses problems specifically in our identification with Leskov as storyteller, who, of course, was also a novelist (though more so known for his short stories). We could draw a few possible inferences from this. The first is that Benjamin means this generally, but it does not apply to Leskov, though this is not further qualified and thus contradictory, or at best ambiguous; the second, is that Benjamin sees this characteristic shared by novelists that come after Leskov, but again there is no exact indication that this is specific to post-Leskov writers; another possibility is that Benjamin’s presentation of Leskov as storyteller was in reference to his status as a short-story writer, not a novelist,20 though here again, the reasoning is flawed as a little further on in the essay Benjamin asserts that the short story has also suffered a similar fate to the novel and ‘has removed itself from oral tradition’21 so that it no longer resembles oral tales.

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Without going any further in this kind of analysis, it is obvious that trying to read the essay according to strict argumentative logic offers little illumination of the problem of how Benjamin is to see Leskov representing the storyteller. The essay which began with a distancing, talks more about the characteristics of the storyteller, and less convincingly of Leskov and how we might read the storyteller in Leskov or in his fiction. The conclusion to this is that although Benjamin’s portrait of the storyteller is largely accurate in terms of its relationship to the historical figure of the storyteller (though arguably written in a ‘romanticised’ and ‘hyberbolic’ manner), Benjamin’s real aim was not to give his ‘reflections on Leskov’ but to reflect on the death of the storyteller. We must look to see what it is that has distanced the storyteller rather than what may bring him closer to us. It is not until section five22 of the essay that we begin to glean the reasons behind the storyteller’s ‘distancing’ from us; this Benjamin attributes to the rise of a very different creature: ‘the novelist’.23 Despite the initial contradiction here – Leskov as novelist and short-story writer – we can still determine that Benjamin’s conceptualization of the novelist, although in some ways directed at the novelist as type24 (representative of all novelists), does address a particular set of concerns. For Benjamin, it is the novelist specifically as an ‘isolated’ and ‘solitary individual’25 who is juxtaposed with the storyteller. It is this isolation that causes the novelist to lose his ability to ‘counsel’, an ability which was and is inherent in the storyteller throughout the ages and that comes out of a need for teaching, for ‘advice’.26 Advice could be simply ‘practical’ or could ‘consist in a moral’ or ‘a proverb or maxim’.27 This was the kind of ‘counsel’ that Benjamin sees as inherent in all stories. If we think back to our historical overview of the storyteller’s art, we can see that this idea still resonates in Benjamin’s essay. Benjamin sees part of the novelist’s isolation as coming from a ‘dependence on the book’28 which, as an ‘invention of printing’,29 has helped shift the processes of communication from one of exchanging and sharing experiences to one of cold, ‘uncounseled’ exchange of information. For Benjamin, this ability to ‘counsel’30 is gained through the exchange or ‘communicability of experience’.31 For the storyteller, this translates as an exchange and retelling of stories traditionally passed on ‘from mouth to mouth’32 by people gathered together in communities. Telling stories not only necessitates an audience and, therefore, creates an immediate dialogic space wherein the communicability of story needs to match the audience’s expectations, but it also necessitates presence, literally, the art and act of bringing people together. The fact that the book produces cultures of solitary ‘writers’ and readers’ is what Benjamin sees as the distinguishing mark that separates the storyteller and the

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novelist and their respective audiences. The culmination of all this is Benjamin’s rupturing of the link between the oral tradition of storytelling and the literary tradition, between story and novel; it is this which breaks the link between the novelist and storyteller who, according to Benjamin, now go their separate ways. He states, What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature – the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella – is that it neither comes from the oral tradition nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular. The storyteller takes what he tells from experience – his own and reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale.33 (My emphasis)

In Benjamin’s conceptualization of the novelist, we begin to see why the storyteller is becoming ever ‘more distant’.34 The novelist’s isolation is diametrically opposed to the storyteller’s community-driven and communal art. In fact, for Benjamin, no actual ‘rupture’35 takes place: the novel has never been part of the oral tradition; the novelist does not have the storyteller as ancestor. (Again, we might question Leskov’s positioning here). This separation of the oral and literary traditions is the first claim that Benjamin makes and whose message might be seen as one that pervades the subsequent history of modern literary criticism. This ‘decay’36 that Benjamin sees entailed by the loss of the storyteller and his art is posited as a ‘modern symptom’;37 it is precisely here too that a second mythology in criticism arises. If the ‘modern’ world is decaying, and the storyteller’s voice is now lost and dying (a symptom of decay), then the high modernist novel as represented, for example by Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), with its multiple perspectives, its non-narratives and streams of consciousness, or by the writings of Beckett with their disembodied, decentred voices speaking out into the void, seems almost a reverse of the practices and outputs of the storyteller. In Joyce and Beckett, it may seem as though the authentic speaker is lost; all that is left are voices which, disembodied, solipsistic or even inhuman, cannot reflect the ‘wealth of tradition’ transmitted through the very presence of the oral storyteller. The link between the sources of the story and Benjamin’s description of the ‘modern’ novel echoes this fragmented yet individualistic search for self. The ‘meaning of life’ is really the center about which the novel moves. But the quest for it is no more than the initial perplexity with which its reader sees himself living this written life. Here ‘meaning of life’ – there ‘moral of the story’: with these slogans novel and story confront each other.38

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Once again, Benjamin’s distinctions clearly posit the individual against the communal; ‘the meaning of life’ purports to the individualistic quest to understand (existential), whereas the ‘moral of the story’ demonstrates the communal ability to teach and learn (ethical). For an academic criticism increasingly sceptical about normative values, Benjamin was right. The storyteller and the oral tradition were definitely out. Interestingly, Benjamin’s demonization of print and the book is inversely reflected in the oral storytelling tradition. Pellowski recognizes that, within the oral tradition, literacy was seen as a kind of contamination and even today some folklorists and anthropologists differentiate the ‘pure’ oral storytelling of primary oral cultures, who have not been influenced by literacy, from those who have been influenced by print. Benjamin’s distinction between oral storyteller and novelist, therefore, confirms, for some, this need for the preservation of separate traditions of pure orality and pure textuality, with proponents from each camp suspicious of contaminations from ‘the other side’. Subsequent criticism’s lack of focus on the storyteller might then be regarded as a derivative – at least in part – of this belief in the essential ‘difference’ between traditions and tellers. In other words, criticism believed that the storyteller was absent, believed that the novelistic tradition was separate to the oral tradition, as Benjamin posits. On the other hand, we cannot lay all the blame on Benjamin: from the Arnoldian concern with culture and anarchy through Eliot’s strictures on tradition and individual talent, high modernism had struggled with this opposition: but Benjamin lays it out as a problem of legacy and genre. What is clear is that essay resonated with subsequent critics; whether they followed Benjamin’s logic or not, there were justifiable reasons why the storyteller simply did not fit within the tradition of the novel (or so they thought), so much so that Benjamin’s essay took on its iconic status and still exerts its influence, even today.

The death of the storyteller? Since 1936, the publication date of Benjamin’s essay, serious critical interest in the storyteller has been, for the most part, in decline. Most critical readings of ‘The Storyteller’ have focused less on an investigation of the storyteller as personified by a writer, or on how we might understand this relationship and why Benjamin professes it is lost, but tend to approach the storyteller as a symbolic figure, centring on what the loss of the storyteller and his art represents: the rise of capitalism, the sterilization of life through bourgeois

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values, the decline of craftsmanship, the growing influence of the media and the press, all of which focuses on ‘information’ rather than the ‘wisdom’ and ‘counsel’ that comes through storytelling. In short, readings focus on the essay’s wider, historical meaning, seeing its message as a reflection of the industrialized and globalized modern world in which the novel and novelists now firmly resided. For example, Shoshana Felman admits that Benjamin’s opening to the essay – which she describes as being ‘as forceful as it is ungraspable’ – does not quite ‘process [or] truly integrate it with the arguments that follow’.39 However, rather than condemning the essay for its ambiguity and ungraspability, she claims that this is ‘not a mere coincidence’ attributing it to the historical situation of its production. Felman states that the essay ‘duplicates and illustrates the point of the text, that the war has left an impact that has struck dumb its survivors, with the effect of interrupting now the continuity of telling and of understanding.’40 For Felman, the ambiguities in Benjamin’s writing style are a reflection of the cultural phenomena that Benjamin was highlighting, arguing that the notions of silence, loss of speech and death are not only derived from the thematic content of the text, but can be drawn from its very style and construction, the way it was written. The loss of the storyteller’s voice is the loss of a voice struck dumb by the trauma of war. Thus, she claims that Benjamin’s use of storytelling and the storyteller is more a [. . .] way of grasping and of bringing into consciousness an unconscious cultural phenomenon and an imperceptible historical process that has taken place outside anyone’s awareness and that can therefore be deciphered, understood, and noticed only retrospectively, in its effects (its symptoms).41

If the effects are the impossibility of telling stories, it is the sharing of experience, the thing that is ‘the securest among our possessions’42 that we have lost. Similarly, John McCole, reads the idea of death and disappearance in ‘The Storyteller’ a death or dissociation of meaning which mirrors ‘the increasingly private nature of experience in nineteenth-century bourgeois society’.43 In McCole’s interpretation, the disappearance of the storyteller and his art represents not so much the ability to exchange experiences, but changes in experience which for Benjamin, constitute a kind of death. McCole observes that if the oral culture of storytelling is a form of sociability and its resource is ‘experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth’,44 then it is the ‘atrophy of experience itself which Benjamin is pointing to’.45 ‘Experience’ becomes symptomatic of cultural and historical reality, that which saw the rise of industrialization and factory

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work, the mechanization of production and the death of ‘the craftsman’, and the mass deaths experienced in the First World War. It is the historical and cultural moment which both these readings in their interpretations of the storyteller reflect, which present the situation of the novel in the early twentieth century: steeped in the literature of high modernism, it was a moment which traced the modernist author’s attempts to deal with the feelings of fragmentation and alienation which reflected the turn of the century Zeitgeist. But this focus on the text and the subject of modernity echoes what Randall Stevenson sees as the modernist preference for looking towards an individualist or even solipsistic ‘inner world of individual emotions rather than the sensible world, the objective world of realist fiction’.46 It is no surprise then that subsequent criticism comes to foreground the author rather than the storyteller, the author who is present or absent, implied, hidden or dead. The author takes centre stage as the singular focus of critical attention for most of the remaining century. A survey of the last 50 years of criticism confirms this, revealing, the author as dominating theoretical and critical debate. Examining conceptions of authorship in early print culture through to contemporary critical concerns related to structuralist and post-structuralist understandings of textuality and its relation to the author, the storyteller rarely figures. Instead, the storyteller appears stranded where Benjamin left him, a figure primarily associated with the world of oral traditions of storytelling. When the terms storyteller and storytelling do make an appearance in studies of contemporary fiction, critics most often use them loosely and with little qualification. There is a dominant tendency within academic literature when discussing ‘storytelling’, to see it as an aspect of a particular novel, the ‘voice’ of an individual character, for example, as if the discourse implicit in storytelling might exist as part of the content of the story but is incommensurable with that of the novelistic (written) discourse that presents that story. Similarly, critical interest in the storyteller and storytelling as a phenomenon worthy of study in itself is rare. ‘Storytelling’ is discussed by critics and presented as if it were a ‘special’ discourse, one differentiated from other discourses that may be employed in novels, but with a little probing one finds that there is no real consensus on its nature. Is it simply another word for narrative discourse? Or does it connote a relationship to the oral storytelling tradition? Or, is it simply an impressionistic way of speaking about ‘folkloric’ elements in a text? Or of identifying storytelling events, exchanges or documentations of storytelling scenes in novels? Most commonly, critics seem to flit between these

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impressionistic uses without being able to clearly formulate what drives the texts that engage with the elusive ‘storytelling’. Generalizations of the storyteller are as prevalent in the critical apparatus of the academy as they are in the more commercial world of publishing and reviewing. To complicate matters further, ‘storytelling’ – indicated as the craft of the storyteller – is attributed to certain writers and not to others, without any clear picture of what is meant by it. Within contemporary literature, for instance, and particularly in book reviews, the word is often preceded by an adjective lending positive value but little definition – a ‘great’, ‘brilliant’ or ‘excellent’ storyteller. In addition, it appears that the term storyteller can be used to describe any writer in any given period, without even the vaguest sense being provided of why so vast a generalization is justified. For example, it is not uncommon to see writers praised for their ‘great yarns’, ‘great storytelling’ or described as ‘excellent storytellers’ by anonymous reviewers, esteemed public critics, and even by other writers. The badge, ‘one of our greatest (living) storytellers’, is routinely pinned on diverse writers across a range of genres, from Peter Carey, Philip Pulman to Margaret Atwood.47 In many ways, therefore, the term ‘storyteller’ is employed to connote either characteristics of a ‘type’ of writer, or to append some indefinable value judgement to a writer’s work, but rarely to offer any more precise set of expectations concerning what we might encounter as readers of their work. In her book of essays, Negotiating the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), Margaret Atwood expresses this imprecision perfectly, noting how it often leads to dubious romantic notions not only as to the nature of the storyteller, but also of the novelist-as-storyteller: It has become a habit for people to speak of novelists as ‘storytellers’, as in ‘one of our best storytellers’, which can be a way for reviewers to get themselves off the hook – you don’t have to say ‘one of our best novelists’ – and can also be a way of saying this writer is good at plots, but not much else. Or it may be a way of indicating that the writer has a certain archaic or folkloric or outlandish or magical quality, reminiscent of a German grandmother propped in a rockingchair telling old wives’ tales, with a bunch of children and the Brothers Grimm gathered round, or of an old blind man or sharp-eyed gypsy woman sitting in the bazaar or the village square, and saying as Robertson Davies was fond of saying, ‘Give me a copper coin and I will tell you a golden tale’.48

Atwood’s comments attack the ‘negative’ connotations of the word storyteller as used expressly by critics and reviewers, which she sees as being vague, lazy and, perhaps, even as derogatory. The connotation that links storytelling with ‘popular’

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fiction (rather than the elite modes of serious or ‘literary’ fiction) spills over into the academy. As Derek Brewer observes, ‘[a]lthough the novel as a form has always and rightly been enormously popular, taking its place along with, or even replacing, the traditional tale, the story-telling aspect of novels has always been despised by intellectuals.’49 Brewer’s comment highlights the misconception at the heart of much criticism that the genesis of storytelling lies in the figure of the novelist and his masterwork, the novel, and that there exists a definite rupture between oral storytelling and literary traditions, a view which critics as diverse as F. R. Leavis and Harold Bloom have sought to perpetuate. In fact, looking back to the function of storytellers throughout the ages, storytelling is a dynamic discourse that encompasses all kinds of narratives – histories, genealogies, philosophy, religious or spiritual truths, morals, societal norms – and its thrust as an important cultural discourse has always incorporated what are perceived as low and high artistic practices with equal appeal to lay and specialized, educated and naive listeners and/or readers. Academic critics, however, have mostly perpetuated the divide between storytelling and the serious literary novel despite the postmodern democratization of taste. Despite its evident intentions, Benjamin’s essay has provided a powerful source of legitimation for such a view. Atwood continues, But there are significant differences between that sort of tale-teller beguiling his or her live audience, and the novelist in his nineteenth-century garret or study, inkwell on desk and pen in hand, or the twentieth-century one in the seedy hotel room so beloved by Cyril Connolly and Ernest Hemingway, hunched over his typewriter, or, by now, her word-processor.50

Interestingly, even Atwood’s own comments appear to fall victim to the stereotype. Like Benjamin before her, she perceives the storyteller and novelist as distinct species, involved in different practices and emerging out of different lineages. Atwood locates the storyteller in the ‘time-honored authorial ploy that consists of pretending (my emphasis) to be an oral tale-teller, as Chaucer did in The Canterbury Tales’ but she insists that this is an ‘illusion’, a deception of the writer because he or she is ‘alone while composing and the tale-teller is not’.51 However, by focusing on the materiality of their differences – one speaks, the other writes; one’s medium is fluid and ephemeral, the other’s is permanent and evidenced; one get’s ‘immediate’ feedback through performance, the other can evade it – Atwood fails to take into account the function of the many similarities between the storyteller’s and the novelist’s practices; moreover, she fails to recognize the reciprocal nature of their influence or the finely wrought and nuanced interrelationships between oral and written words and worlds.

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Reconceptualizing Benjamin’s ‘Storyteller’: Tracing pre-modern storytelling practices One of the recurring issues in criticism and theory is a notable tension in the relationship between speech and writing, one which Ivan Kreilkamp sees as containing the paradox ‘that speech is both extremely powerful and doomed to cultural obsolescence’.52 In Benjamin’s ‘Storyteller’, we see this tension played out between story and novel, storyteller and novelist, the oral tradition and the written (novelistic) literary tradition. In many ways, it is this terse relationship which is the cornerstone of any conception of the storyteller or any subsequent ‘theorisation’ of the storyteller in theories of the novel. It serves as a foundation to Benjamin’s conception of the storyteller, one which, as we have seen, has reflected (if not influenced) the subsequent trajectory that contemporary criticism has taken on this issue since ‘The Storyteller’ was published. In turn, it has also served to shape our understanding of the figure of the novelistic author who, whether we believe in him or not, is very much conjoined to the text. All the writers discussed in this book problematize notions such as speech, orality, the voice of the teller and the listening audience in their texts through their evocations of the storyteller. However, these evocations can only point to re-enactments of oral storytelling, that is, they constitute a simulated orality, or are mere simulations of the storyteller. In this sense, Atwood’s comments (above) – which place the storyteller and novelist in distinct oral and written worlds – are essentially correct. Although the notion of the simulation has most often been associated with postmodernist fiction, the ‘simulated’ or ‘staged’ orality that can be found in novels is not exclusively tied to postmodernism and can apply to any such ‘staged’ or ‘simulated’ orality in written literature from pre- and post-Chaucer to the present day. In fact, in many ways this is a necessary consequence of the materiality of the written text and arguably, any such practices within the novel, at any point in its history, will be ‘simulated’ in this sense. As the oral is voiced and is heard, and hence, at its origin emanates from a present and embodied human being, the possibility of there ever being an ‘oral storyteller’ that conceivably writes a novel is, in an immediate sense, already negated. Just as Roland Barthes, in his seminal essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968),53 announced the author’s ‘death’, and as a generation of post-structuralist critics have subsequently gone on to demonstrate, even the figure of author can be construed as a kind of ‘simulation. In many ways, therefore, whether you choose to believe that the storyteller has or has not returned to the novel, will very much depend on which angle on the speech and writing spectrum you are viewing from; or, as Krielkamp succinctly

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put it, whether you fall into the camp of conceiving ‘voice as a single unitary thing we have lost or are on the way to losing’ (a Benjaminian influence), or whether you believe that ‘voice is heterogeneous and still thrives in modern print culture’.54 In other words, whether you choose to believe, as Atwood expresses it, that the voice is an illusion so that you believe only in the materiality of the text, or whether you believe that the voice can still be ‘alive’ within the text as a mysterious but real presence. We can see, even from Benjamin’s sparse account of Leskov as storyteller, that placing the storyteller in the role of writer is not a project that can be undertaken literally, or easily. However, this does not discount the possibility of relating the storyteller and the writer, or that the interchange between these two figures and their respective practices or modes of discourse cannot be dynamically reconceived and experienced. As Nicholas Paige notes, ‘storytellers in books are primarily fictions, of course, but this is not to say they don’t have a documentary character as well’.55 Paige’s conception of ‘a documentary character’, relates to storytelling motifs, and storytelling practices which, he claims, can be traced in literature from at least the seventeenth century onwards (he looks specifically at the French novel). His project has the same impetus as Ivan Kreilkamp’s booklength study of Victorian fiction (addressed later), in that they both contest Benjamin’s conception of the novel’s rise to power at the expense of the storyteller. What both Paige and Kreilkamp attest to is to a relationship that print culture (and literary fictional genres, including the novel) has had to the storyteller and to storytelling practices in earlier literature. Their studies are the first to urge us to look closer at the relationship of voice to print in relation to the figure of the storyteller. Paige questions, mightn’t the figure of the storyteller, featured in one form or another in much European prose fiction prior to the nineteenth century, hold some clues to how authors and readers came to think about print as a medium suited to certain forms of fiction and hostile to others? What exactly is the fate of the storyteller, and the fictional genres he underwrites, in a world of printed books?56

Indeed, as noted above, for all Benjamin’s pronouncements, he failed to qualify whether the storyteller (outside of his rough example of Leskov) appeared prior to the twentieth century in literary fiction (and the novel more specifically) and also failed to look forward to any potentialities that the novel might have where a storyteller figure could reappear albeit in a new form. Part of this project of tracing the storyteller in earlier fiction has now begun. Rather than seeing the modern novel as a ‘competitor’ of or ‘replacement’ for the

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ancient art of storytelling, we can begin to conceive of the novel as ‘a variation’57 of the art and thus to begin to return the storyteller to his place, albeit in different form, in the novel. Paige, drawing on Franco Moretti’s concept of ‘life cycles’, reminds us that genres effectively do not remain static, and that a moment comes when ‘its inner form can no longer represent the most significant aspects of contemporary reality’.58 In other words, if Benjamin’s ‘Storyteller’ failed to conceive of (positive) change, it brought yet more significant portents of change with it. Paige looks back to seventeenth-century France in order to trace a more dynamic relationship between literary and oral storytelling practices in what he calls the ‘coterie model’, in romance, frame tales, and the devisant genres. Drawing on Roger Chartier’s research, Paige finds that print culture was influenced and informed by ‘a culture of recitation that kept the printed book in the service of royalty and sociability well into the eighteenth century’.59 Importantly, the relationship between oral and written storytelling practices that he conceives is dynamic and is set against other perhaps more common critical conceptualizations of these practices to print culture (when they do appear). Paige quotes Peter Brooks and Ross Chambers whom he sees as downplaying the significance of storytellers and storytelling in novels by seeing their appearance as either ‘nostalgic’ (Brooks) or as ‘mediated and inauthentic’ (Chambers).60 Paige, instead, enforces the notion that any motifs or allusions to storytelling and the storyteller would, of course, be ‘simulated’ but that this does not discount their relevance. Indeed, a closer examination of these practices is important in that in so doing it ‘may tell us something about the forces presiding over their own composition and the way that these forces interact with inherited, seemingly perennial literary commonplaces.’61 Paige finds that the influence of ‘real’ storytelling practices are more than what is apparent in print; his essays argue a ‘persuasive case’ for viewing ‘characteristics often thought of as intrinsic to print (as) in fact the object of much cultural work’.62 In terms of the place of the storyteller and storytelling practices in French literature from the seventeenth century onwards, what he finds is that: Precisely because historical conditions, real as they are, have no inevitable generic outcome, the storyteller helped a culture work through narrative options available once the coterie model had weakened. That the storyteller’s appearances were so many, so varied, and so extensive, suggests that this work was probably more unconscious than voluntary. But this very fact challenges typical histories of the novel, in which almost always the same works gain significance in proportion to the Olympian acuity we can discern in their authors.63

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Paige’s essay is persuasive and provides some useful evidence in terms of helping us to perceive the relationship between storyteller and book, but it is in Kreilkamp’s larger study that we begin to find more substantial evidence (albeit restricted to the Victorian novel) of the dynamic relationship played out between oral storytelling and written literary practices and how the storyteller emerges from these. Kreilkamp puts Benjamin’s essay into context, or at least gives it a clearer framework from which to understand the place of the storyteller in earlier fictional practice. ‘The Storyteller’ narrates the decline of the powerful individual voice that, we are to believe, once unified and defined a community that sprang up around him. Benjamin’s nostalgia for a community of listeners cannot be disentangled from his longing for the solitary speaker whose voice centred that community. Storytelling and voice become highly charged emblems of loss, overdetermined by the desire for a mode of literary and critical production in which the ‘charismatic aura’ of the solitary intellectual might stand alone and speak out within a modernity unfriendly to sages.64

Kreilkamp sees what he labels as a subsequent ‘mythologizing of the storyteller’ in contemporary criticism that serves to protect ‘literature and particularly fiction from the mechanization and inhumanity of industrial print’.65 In Benjamin’s ‘Storyteller’ he identifies a ‘mourning for the individual cultural producer in modernity’,66 which he sees as represented by the figure of the storyteller. Kreilkamp’s study seeks to prove that rather than be relegated to an archaic past, ‘the storyteller came into being as a fiction within the very medium that is accused of having killed him off ’.67 Rather than been mystified, displaced or even ‘murdered’, voice, orality and oral storytelling traditions and the storyteller are seen to have broken out and become variously apparent in the rising medium of print. Kreilkamp argues that it is in the Victorian novel that this storyteller emerges as a redemptive figure, one that can ‘save’ the masses from the inauthenticity of mass-production. He notes: Novels are mass-produced and distributed throughout the country to readers who cannot know or be known by the novels’ authors. Yet by defining a novel as the utterance of a powerfully authentic speaker, authors and critics can claim that novelistic language generates the same kind of community supposedly once defined by face-to-face oral exchange. From Dickens onward, then, the figure of the storyteller emerges within British fiction as the sign of the endangered intellectual authority, charisma, and personal presence.68

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Drawing on Katie Trumpener’s monograph Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, Kreilkamp notes how, in late eighteenthcentury and nineteenth-century British literature, the bard could be traced as an influence on the novel. The bard was a significant cultural icon at the time, and as the tradition of the bard moved into print culture, these two visions of the bard emerged: one that embodied ‘print culture’ – the English poet – and the other that embodied ‘the oral tradition’ – the (Celtic) nationalist. Kreilkamp’s repositioning of the storyteller in the tradition of nineteenth-century Victorian fiction is traced back in part to the function of two rival visions of the bard who were commonplace in late eighteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature. Trumpener explains, For nationalist [Celtic] antiquaries, the bard is the mouthpiece for a whole of society articulating its values, chronicling its history, and mourning the inconsolable tragedy of its collapse. English poets, in contrast, image the bard (and the minstrel after him) as an inspired, isolated, and peripatetic figure . . . [H]e represents poetry as a dislocated art, standing apart from and transcending its particular time and place.69

Kreilkamp sees the Victorian storyteller within the tradition of the novel as borrowing characteristics from both figures. The storyteller borrows from the Celtic bard ‘prestige associated with an endangered voice within modern print’ but not his political leanings, and from the Romantic-era bard he borrows the notion of ‘a transcendent English aesthetic’.70 What is interesting in Kreilkamp’s reading of Victorian fiction is that he sees the storyteller reappear within print culture both as a redeemer of print by voice and presence, but also as a continuation of traditional figures before him who had definite functions within society that were not, importantly, disseminated by print. Paige and Kreilkamp’s studies, therefore, lead us to two important notions in our tracing of the storyteller in contemporary (postmodern) fiction. The first relates to what Kreikamp calls ‘the paradox of speech and writing’ and has to do with whether we are prepared to see ‘voice’ as a dynamic construct within the text. The second, that relates to this, is that by seeing the potentiality of voice within the text we can then begin to trace this voice back to a ‘living storyteller’ and to the culture and audience in which and to which he told his stories. This is significant if we are to see the novel, and therefore fiction and the fictioneer (both storyteller and writer), as cultural producers and preservers, as belonging to one continuing but shape-shifting and dynamic tradition, rather than two distinct and separate ones which follow their own trajectories.

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Secondary orality and the rise of the postmodern storyteller Although he does not state it directly, we can glean perhaps from the various characterizations that Benjamin ascribes to him, that the storyteller is very much situated in a primary oral culture, where writing either did not exist, or was not dominant. The oral tradition he evokes goes back to artisans, to the folk, where writing does not seem to feature. Here, memory’s key role in story transfer is highlighted, one which the ‘listener’ recalls due to the rhythmic repetition of story and its numerous retellings. Despite the fact that Benjamin ascribed the role of storyteller to the writer, Leskov, the notion of secondary orality, or to put it another way, of a (secondary) oral culture influencing the written, does not seem to be a property of his polemic. But it is this situation of secondary orality, already on the rise at the beginning of the twentieth century, which, as Rita Barnard’s reading of Nathaniel West’s 1933 novella Miss Lonelyhearts exemplifies, transfers the storyteller’s ‘voice’ – which she equates with Benjamin’s ability to ‘counsel’ – to an (almost) self-consciously simulated authenticity: the advice column.71 In this essay – in which Barnard investigates a thematic link between Nathaniel West’s 1933 novella Miss Lonelyhearts and Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ – Barnard takes as a starting point Benjamin’s idea of advice, examining it in relation to the advice-columnist who is the central character in West’s novella. Barnard contests Benjamin’s notion of the loss of experience, and implicitly, his polarized view of narrative forms, within which he posits his conception of the novel, and instead raises some interesting points about emerging narrative forms brought about by the processes of modernity that were sweeping across the Western world. She notes: It would appear, in short, that the value of experience did not, in fact, fall straight into ‘bottomlessness’ as Benjamin theorizes, but that personal experience, as well as old-fashioned advice, was instead resuscitated –sublated, if you will – in a corporate and commodified guise.72

These guises that Barnard identifies are to be found in other forms of massmedia which were growing as part of the developments of modernity, and which, following Ong,73 we can conceive of as emerging out of secondary oral cultures. (Indeed, Kreilkamp’s reading of Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness follows similar lines: he talks about the ‘phonograph’ as one such rising media, but one

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which the Victorian era saw as ‘demonic’74 or ‘dehumanised’ rather than ‘displaced’ or ‘simulated’.) Although Barnard agrees with Benjamin that the ‘authentic’ voice of the storyteller is lost, she shows that Benjamin did not account for the simulation of authenticity which was brought about by other mass-media: the radio, advice columns and even comic strips. Barnard uses the example of the slogan and the speech balloon as places where the simulation of the storyteller’s authentic personal wisdom could be found. Thus she suggests that: it is perhaps then necessary to find a second paradigm: one which could count not only for the loss of the authentic voice of the storyteller, but also for the reinvention and simulation of authenticity – the commercialised survival of traditional forms in the mass-mediated culture of the time.75

This is where Barnard’s arguments are particularly useful and move us forward from modernist to the planting of the first seeds of postmodernist discourses, fully spawned some 20 to 30 years later. Although Barnard’s reading of West’s novel is pre-1950, it clearly points to what this book reveals as an emerging trend in post-war fiction which began to simulate this return to the ‘authenticity’ that the storyteller, in his embodied form, represented. The fact that Barnard’s reading traces this idea in a 1933 novella rocks the foundations of Benjamin’s constructions of the novelist as being wholly ‘other’ to the storyteller, or at least in terms of this notion as being ‘fixed’. Clearly, even at the time he was writing, advice, or storyteller wisdom, be it in a simulated mode, was still being sought and given. As Peter Brooks notes: ‘Simulation of orality in writing appears to want to restore this situation of live communication in a medium that is necessary marked by detachment, solitude, privacy, and lack of context’ or at least, if we agree with Benjamin (and Brooks) that this is what constitutes a novel.76 However, does the novel stay this way, if it really has been detached? As we have seen from the example of West’s novel above, the rise of secondary orality was already beginning to bring with it new media which provided scope for a variety of communicative practices which interacted with oral practices. Drawing on Walter Ong’s research on primary and secondary orality, Irene Kacandes observes that: In addition, then, to literacy’s legacy of privileging information and the individual who ‘communicates’ it, secondary oral cultures display features known to characterize primary oral cultures: a strong communal sense, desire for participation, and love of spontaneity. What distinguishes these features in a secondary oral culture from these features in a primary culture is a mental capability developed through literacy: self-consciousness.77 (My emphasis)

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Irene Kacandes’s construct, ‘talk fiction’, explores contemporary fiction through its relationship to broadcast media such as the talk show, talk radio and television, looking specifically at how one might map their influences on fiction. Kacandes, drawing on Ong, claims that in these new media practices, the notion of ‘secondary’ is ‘forgotten’ because the fiction is experienced as happening ‘spontaneously’78 (as is the case when watching a talk show, for example). Kacandes’s study traces the relationship between talk shows and other media in the novel, highlighting their shared foundation in pretence, lies, appearances and performance and in audiences, attributes and conditions which also significantly relate to the storyteller. Kacandes, in the spirit of Kreilkamp and Paige above, does not seek to ‘undermine (the) appreciation of literature as a distinctive form of communication but rather (to) challenge the notion that it is somehow a sacrosanct one that responds only to internal formal developments.’79 Drawing on Jane Shattuc’s research,80 Kacandes traces the historical roots of the talk show to seventeenth-century broadsheets (reminding us of Paige and Kreilkamp’s investigations above) that were themselves ‘descendants of such oral traditions as the town crier, gossip and folk tales’.81 Once again, the influence of an oral teller who performed a specific function in the community resurfaces, strengthening the notion that, in fact, the storyteller and storytelling practices have always informed literature. Kacandes’s study draws in part, on research by Tolmach Lakoff who is one of the first scholars to elucidate specific ways in which the oral mode is being incorporated in writing. He looks at how non-standard uses of language within written discourse – for example, quotation marks, italics, ellipses, capitalization and orthography – can be employed as a means of indicating speech.82 Lakoff identifies that when ‘a current practice deviates from traditional practice itself communicates that this writing is trying not to be writing, but presumably its “opposite”: speech.’83 Lakoff attributes this move to return speech modes to writing as a ‘shift in our society from a literacy-based model of ideal human communication to one based on the oral mode of discourse’; moreover, the reasons he gives to support this shift are that society, now ‘suspicious of speech that sounds rehearsed’, instead favours, ‘spontaneity, or what sounds like it – in both speech and writing’84. Kacandes’ recognizes the usefulness of Lakoff ’s research in relation to societal shifts which foreground oral communication; however, her mode of ‘talk fiction’ moves away from simply looking for ‘speech’ within texts but rather sees the text itself as ‘speaking’. She explains, Talk-fiction texts are not ‘translations into writing which we understand through reference to speaking’ (Lakoff 247). Rather, they mobilize textual strategies that

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The Return of the Storyteller in Contemporary Fiction reveal orientation to exchange between text and reader. That is to say: I call my phenomenon Talk neither because the written page sounds like oral speech nor even because it signals difference that should be interpreted as informal or spontaneous – and therefore as resembling speech more than writing – but rather because talk fiction performs what many experts identify as the central function of speech: it creates relationships and invites interaction.85

Kacandes’s model, therefore, moves outside the text, beyond narrators and narratees, instead viewing the whole ‘text’ as a statement that invites a response. She proposes her concept of ‘talk fiction’ as a turn-taking system where there is no distinction between narratological levels, since the whole text is conceived of as a statement that invites a reply. Moreover, the ideas of turn-taking and of moves which are not necessarily verbal, invite the addition of a set of arrows pointing in the opposite direction, from the real reader back towards the authornarrator.86 Kacandes locates ‘talk fiction’ in the twentieth century, but places it within a postmodernist mode, which she distinguishes from modernism in that it ‘aims to have effects in the real world’.87 She further breaks down her concept of ‘talk fiction’ into four key modes: storytelling, testimony, apostrophe and interactivity. Interestingly, Kacandes’s mode of storytelling is characterized by an ‘overt reader address’ which she posits against modernism’s ‘idealist, aestheticist line of thinking’ and which she sees as ‘self-consciously re-emerging in some works in the second half of the twentieth century’.88 Both Kacandes’s and Lakoff ’s models are useful for our understanding of the shift in postmodern fiction, or what we could call post 1950s fiction, to modes where the influence of secondary orality has impacted on the text, emphasizing the ‘oral’. What is particularly useful to take from Lakoff ’s model in relation to the return of the storyteller, is his notion of spontaneity and the suspicion of ‘rehearsed speech’ which echoes Kreilkamp’s concept of the authenticity of the speech of the storyteller. If spontaneous speech is somehow more ‘trustworthy’ and honest than the rehearsed and polished speech that might be delivered as a consequence of pre-written text, then this could apply to our conception of the fiction writer. Moreover, if we take from Kacandes’s model that the whole text, as well as the narrators and narratees implied within the text, can be ‘speaking’ to us and calling for a response, we can relate this to the storyteller and the importance of a present and interactive audience. In Kacandes’s conceptualization of ‘talk fiction’ she posits the notion that the text calls for a ‘response’, often urging readers to ‘hear’ the text as if it were spoken, and thus placing them into the role of listener. Where Kacandes’s and my own perceptions converge is in the realization that texts can call for interaction – for

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example, by placing the reader into the role of listener – and in the highlighting of the speaking voice (which I see as a storytelling voice of the storyteller) within the fiction. What is also convergent in our thinking is the understanding that these modes have come about through a shift from modernist to postmodernist practices in fiction, practices which have been influenced by a re-privileging or ‘trust’ in speech due to the rise of secondary orality. Unsurprisingly, the condition of secondary oral cultures mirrors some of the features of primary oral cultures which saw storytelling and the storyteller solely responsible for the preservation and creation of cultural memories through fictions. As Ong notes, In a like vein, where primary orality promotes spontaneity because the analytic reflectiveness implemented by writing is unavailable, secondary orality promotes spontaneity because through analytic reflection we have decided that spontaneity is a good thing. We plan our happenings carefully to be sure that they are thoroughly spontaneous.89

In the fiction of the postmodern age of (predominantly) industrialized societies where secondary orality is prevalent, the notion of spontaneity and authenticity directly links to the rise in secondary orality which is also reflected in the rise of ‘new’ media. However, whereas in the Victorian age – pre-Benjamin, but which, significantly, sat on the edge of modernist aesthetic practices –new media such as the phonograph were seen as suspicious and dehumanizing, the postmodern age has instead embraced new media and allowed for a ‘simulated’ authenticity to emerge and be recognized. The notion of the authentic speaker in postmodern society arises from the embracing of the simulation of orality; it is this, in turn, that allows the experience of a perceived spontaneity, which no matter whether it is performed ‘live’ or not, seems to signal ‘trust’, and is, therefore, authentic. It is thus in this environment where the reappropriation of the oral storyteller can emerge and can take a variety of forms, one of which is witnessed as a return to the novel. Following this line of argument, therefore, we could conceive of the return of the storyteller in the novel as being reflected in postmodernist fiction, a type of fiction which is primarily associated with the American avante-garde, of which John Barth is a key figure.90 Interestingly, in this period, as Patricia Waugh notes, ‘John Barth talked about abandoning the literature of exhaustion for the essentially parodic mode of replenishment’ – a reactionary concept which was posited against the modernist fear that all modes of representation had been ‘used up’; and where Leslie Fiedler similarly talked of ‘a new art which would bridge the gap between high and mass culture and undo the elitist “autonomy”’,

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the aesthetic withdrawal from mass culture which he associated with modernist writing.’91 To put this into historical context, it was less than 20 years earlier that Benjamin had written his essay on the storyteller, a period where high modernist practice was at its peak and where it had begun to seem as though the novel in its serious literary manifestation had indeed lost the ability to ‘speak’ to the people and needed to be ‘undone’. Barth’s concept of replenishment saw the beginnings of this ‘undoing’ which was witnessed by a return to earlier modes of fiction such as the folk-tale and folk-narrative cycles of collections from Medieval and Renaissance (mainly European) texts such as The Decameron and The Thousand and One Arabian Nights.92 According to Stephen Benson, whose book Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale, Theory (2003) traces the influence of the folktale in postmodernist fiction, what is observable in folk-narrative cycles such as the Nights is that they ‘enact’93 or simulate orality (Benson labels this a ‘staged orality’,94), one which is achieved through mimicking orality and by staging the event of narration. However, for Medieval and Renaissance texts such as the two examples above, orality is ‘not primarily a self-conscious device’, – as it is in postmodern fiction – ‘a metafiction avant la letter but rather a sign of historical provenance’.95 For the postmodernist writer, therefore, who is self-consciously employing narratives derived from ‘folk cycles’ within the text as a means of ‘replenishing literature’,96 then the potentiality for them to also ‘enact’ the already ‘enacted’ orality of the primary text is high. In other words, by reworking the folktale or frame-tale, the contemporary writer succeeds in producing texts which ‘tell’ more than they ‘show’ since they are similarly constructed around the idea of ‘telling’ stories. Benson’s study is one of the few that moves outside the often constrictive tendency of contemporary criticism to situate writers’ reworking of the folktale (and/or fairy tale) in revisionist feminist fiction or in the context of post-colonial fictions which derive from cultures where literacy is perhaps less established and where oral storytelling traditions still exist. His book refreshingly takes a broader view of the revival of folk- and fairy tales in contemporary literature exploring writers’ engagement with these genres and correctly situating them within the larger frame of postmodern fiction. Benson, for example, directly traces the experimental fiction of writers such as John Barth and Italo Calvino to the folktale, linking the use of the folktale and its revival firmly to early postmodernist writing. Some of the impetus of behind this revival, Benson recognizes (he applies this to Calvino in particular), was due to ‘a turning away from the dominant European tradition

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of novelistic writing based on the extended realist narrative and its attendant psychologically complex characterization’.97 He correctly recognizes (albeit in the fiction of Calvino) that part of what this shift in novelistic discourse towards the appropriation of the ‘folk tale’ demonstrates – a shift in practice he calls ‘unnovelistic’98 – is a move away from the conception and presentation of writers as ‘authors’, which, in turn, brings them back to the storyteller. Benson notes that Calvino ‘casts himself very much in the role of the anonymous tale-teller drawing on a store of past materials rather than the author striving for the subjective expression of originality.’99 Although not all the writers examined in this book engage explicitly with the folktale, Benson’s argument certainly has resonance and has a more general relevance in examining the modes of return to the storyteller. How might this conception of the storyteller vis-à-vis the novelist sit, however, in a specifically postmodern world? What does the novel look like in the condition of postmodernity? For this, let’s turn for a moment to Lyotard who begins with the notion of story. In his book The Postmodern Condition (1979) Jean-Francois Lyotard presents narrative as ‘the quintessential form of customary knowledge’ which, he argues, is observable from the earliest societies.100 In order to exemplify this he evokes the storyteller, analysing how storytelling works for the Cashinahua, an indigenous tribe from the South American Amazon. Lyotard notes that the stories of this tribe begin and end with a formulaic phrase, ‘Here is the story of –, as I have always heard it told. I will tell it to you in my turn. Listen.” [. . .] Here ends the story of –. The man who told it to you is – (name).’101 In Lyotard’s description, we observe how, at storytelling’s core, is the process of handing down stories, from one storyteller to another to a community or audience. Moreover, the purpose of storytelling for the Cashinahua is a means by which the tribe shares their historical knowledge, constructs their identity and orders their society. Against this simple example Lyotard presents a number of metanarratives, describing the different ways they organize knowledge and he claims that modernity is essentially based on a type of metanarrative organization. As such, Lyotard memorably declares the demise of what he defines as the two key grand narratives of modernity. The first, the speculative grand narrative, pertains to the idea of knowledge as progress that moves towards an ‘absolute’ end; the second, the grand narrative of emancipation, presents knowledge as valuable because it forms the basis of human freedom, where humanity is posited as the hero of liberty. For Lyotard, knowledge as presented within these metanarratives is reflected in all social institutions such as law, education, technology, and acquires

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a vocation and role for the greater good of humanity. It is against this ideological framework that Lyotard posits what he calls the postmodern condition, a condition which he sees as ‘an incredulity towards metanarratives’102 and one which has essentially arisen due to transformations in knowledge that have taken place in the latter part of the twentieth century. Reading Lyotard through the prism of Benjamin’s essay, we can perhaps reposition Benjamin’s notion of ‘decay’ as ultimately culminating in the loss of faith in the grand narratives of modernity. No longer striving towards perfection, modernity had begun to regress. But the condition of postmodernity according to Lyotard does not provide much hope either. For Lyotard, the greatest threat facing postmodern society is the capitalist system, a ‘dehumanising’103 system primarily due to the way knowledge is judged in terms of its financial value and its technological efficiency – a construct that echoes Benjamin’s warning for the loss of the authentic cultural producer and preserver enshrined in the figure of the storyteller. As support and respect for non-efficient knowledge – non-profitable or non-technological – declines, and is ultimately threatened with extinction, then morality, ethics and those metanarratives which constitute ‘the concept of the greater good’ (and with these humanity in general), sit perilously at the edge of the abyss. Here again, Benjamin’s essay resonates; Benjamin’s mourning for the loss of our ability to exchange experiences has now been substituted by the drive to exchange money: we see instead a commodification of knowledge, and even art. Curiously, however, Lyotard does offer a way – although not simple – out of this bleak situation. His polemic against the threat posed by an all-engulfing capitalist ideology, finds its roots in stories. Although Lyotard recognizes that in postmodern societies universal consensus is an impossibility, it is by allowing what he calls individual petits récits (little narratives) to emerge that we can counteract their power. It is in these narratives – which cannot be reduced to the criterion of efficacy – where a series of language games emerge which destabilize dominant systems of knowledge such as international capitalism by offering a perspective that disturbs their hegemony. Lyotard uses science, not literature, to exemplify this destablizing effect produced by little narratives. He argues that quantum theory and big bang cosmology have destabilized the ‘truth-effect’ of much of traditional realist science and present science as narratives of a kind of truth. Moreover, as he is less interested in the content of scientific knowledge but rather in its structures, the ‘grand narratives’ of modernity are contrasted

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with the ‘little narratives’ (petits récits) of an emergent postmodernity, which, he argues, remain ‘the quintessential form of imaginative invention’.104 Thus, Lyotard, borrowing a phrase from P. B. Medwar, sees the scientist as a person ‘who tells stories’, and as such, we could say that he is returning full circle to the storyteller. Although Lyotard’s is not the only model of postmodernity, nor is postmodernity a precise historical condition,105 or a complete one, nevertheless, Lyotard’s view reflects the strong tendency within postmodernism to construct our knowledge of the world in stories, from grand to petit. Lyotard has left us with a conception of the postmodern world in which a sea of little stories dominate and where the storyteller shape-shifts into various guises: scientists, priests, teachers, politicians. Indeed, postmodernism has come to be regarded as the recognition that there is nothing outside stories, a fact which has led David Simpson to ask the pertinent question: ‘What, we might wonder, is the grand narrative behind the compulsive appeal of little stories?’106 This is where the return of the storyteller in the condition of postmodernity and beyond begins to resonate. The loss of faith in the grand narratives of modernity have led us to reconsider how knowledge is constructed and co-constructed to the point that knowledge becomes not something outside of ourselves, and something towards which we strive, but rather, something that we create ourselves. It is this creative act, that returns knowledge to story rather than history for example, and brings us back to the storyteller. Indeed, isn’t this what Benjamin was lamenting, when he mourned for the loss of the storyteller in the condition of modernity? Lyotard’s conception of the postmodern is, of course, not specifically geared towards the study of literature, and as such, the term postmodernist in relation to literary fiction, takes on its own particular (albeit shifting) definition(s). However, what is particularly pertinent to an understanding of how the postmodern might relate to literature, and where Lytoard’s formulations are particularly useful, is his conception of the return of ‘little’ stories, stories which in many ways, arguably evoke the age-old practice of the archetypal storyteller. From this perspective, it is therefore surprising that this link to the storyteller has been generally overlooked in literary academic criticism, to the point that critics like David Simpson can ask what the meaning of it all is. Indeed, from the beginnings of postmodernist fiction in the 1950s (with Barth),107 as Waugh notes, ‘the term shifts from descriptions of a range of aesthetic practices (the avant-gardism of early postmodernist American

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fiction) involving playful irony, parody, parataxis, self-consciousness, fragmentation, to a use which encompasses a more general shift in thought and seems to register a pervasive cynicism about the progressivist ideals of modernity’,108 ideas that are resonant with Benjamin and his essay ‘The Storyteller’. Curiously, viewed from this angle, the figure of the storyteller, one that represents perhaps the human and the humane, man’s proximity to his land and community, seems to be the antithesis of the fiction, both modernist and postmodernist which was produced in the condition of (post)modernity. However, we must be wary of positioning modernism and postmodernism against each other, or indeed, in situating fiction in any ‘fixed’ ideological or philosophical frame. Similarly, we must be wary of trying to draw neat demarcation lines between modernist and postmodernist fiction. This is what I have been arguing against in relation to placing the novelist and storyteller as polar opposites. Critical enquiry has also taught us this much. Ihab Hassan, for example, is a little more cautious: Modernism and postmodernism are not separated by an Iron Curtain or Chinese Wall; for history is a palimpsest, and culture is permeable to time past, time present, and time future. We are all, I suspect, a little Victorian, Modern, and Postmodern, at once.109

By creating a binary opposition between the terms modernism and postmodernism, we have failed to see the more subtle transformations or, to use a metaphor, to hear the real petit recits that actually destabilize their own theoretical systems and inherent ideologies. What comes out of the readings of the storyteller in this book is a foregrounding of the art of the storyteller in ‘storytelling’ understood as the most fundamental of human discourses for man is a ‘storytelling animal’. Storytelling offers us a space wherein to question, play with, entertain, please and despair of all that ‘experience’ of the world entails: the larger concept of experience includes all of our philosophical, religious, ideological, sociological, historical constructions and it is this which contemporary novelists have foregrounded in their return to the storyteller. Although the concept of universal consensus has been proven illusory, the belief in human freedom and progress still exists and perhaps it is in our ‘little’ stories, stories that are brought to us by the storyteller, where these notions are still very much alive. As Waugh states: grand narratives may be seen (on a theoretical level) to have collapsed. However, if people still continue to invest in them, then they can continue to exist. If

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they are ways of formulating fundamental human needs, their ‘grandness’ is a measure of the urgency and persistence of the need invested in them. They are unlikely to die, though they may be profoundly transformed.110

It is in this transformative spirit that the return of the storyteller presents itself in the contemporary novel.

The return of the storyteller In recent years the interest in stories and (implicitly if not always explicitly) in the storyteller has been growing. Stirrings from various disciplines (outside literary studies) have began to assert the importance of story to man. For example, the turn towards evolutionary explanations of human behaviour has reinforced, from a scientific perspective, the significance of stories to human survival. Science itself has begun to take an interest in storytelling and the storyteller. The American evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould for example, sees storytelling as fundamental to our natures. We are ‘storytelling creatures’ and our tendency to tell stories may be one of the conditions of consciousness and intelligence itself, the way the human mind works. He states, Any definition of this (human) uniqueness, embedded as it is our possession of language, must involve our ability to frame the world as stories and to transmit these tales to others. If the propensity to grasp nature as story has distorted our perceptions, I shall accept this limit of mentality upon knowledge.111

This view is reiterated by the psychoanalyst Simon O. Lesser in his book Fiction and the Unconscious (1957) who asserts: By the time man learned to read and write, much of such wisdom as he had amassed was probably already cast in story form. He had evidently created – or evolved – stories which set forth his surmises [. . .]. It must have seemed natural to man [. . .] to turn fiction for images of his experience, his wishes and fears. Fiction was probably among the earliest of his artifices.112

Lesser goes on to say that ‘the frequency with which discourses fall into – or are deliberately given – a narrative model [. . .] suggest the hold that mould has upon the human mind’,113 a proposition which Mark Turner set out to prove in his highly original study, The Literary Mind (1996).114 Turner, who has served his apprenticeship in neural and cognitive science before moving into literary

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studies, premises his argument on the notion that storytelling is linked to our fundamental cognitive process, to how our mind works. He states: Narrative imagining – story – is the fundamental instrument of thought. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining. It is a literary capacity indispensable to human cognition general. This is the first way in which the mind is essentially literary.115

Turner explains how the capacity to recognize and tell stories is not only universal, but ‘essential to being human’,116 and stresses the fact that stories are inventions and that ‘our core indispensable stories not only can be invented, they must be invented if we are to survive and have human lives’.117 More recently in his ground-breaking work The Mind and Its Stories (2003),118 Patrick Colm Hogan links universals in literature to universals in emotion. Hogan maintains that debates over the cultural specificity of emotion have been misdirected because they have largely ignored a vast body of data that bears directly on the way different cultures imagine and experience emotion in literature. He also posits storytelling, in all its shapes and sizes, as a practice which is as old as the human species, and one that continues to perform a vital function in the everyday experiences of people worldwide. Hogan’s foregrounding of the emotion of empathy, which helps us to learn from others’ experiences, echoes Benjamin most poignantly. One of the main reasons for this is that narration acts on our emotions in very particular ways, some of them so important that they have contributed to humankind’s survival, evolution and development. Storytelling is linked to man’s evolutionary capacity which is fundamental to his survival. In the novels I read in this book, this capacity is very much apparent. Similarly the work of Jerome Bruner in the field of psychology, has related a shift in psychoanalytic theory towards a notion of ‘the self as storyteller’ and also the concept of the ‘self as a telling’.119 In terms of narrative theory, we have seen some headway into how these studies might be translated. As Stephen Benson notes, there has been a ‘move towards a conception of narrative less as a model than as an act’,120 all of which points to what Jonathan Gottschall has argued in his book of the same name, that man is essentially ‘a storytelling animal’ and it is this which ‘makes us human’.121 These studies reveal that the storyteller and storytelling is both integral to and a necessary functioning of man. How, then, could we think of disconnecting the modes and methods of this capacity into separate traditions, into oral and literary? If man is a storyteller, then so is the novelist or author. Our blinkered focus on the text has led us to forget (or worse alter) our definitions and with them

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the direction with which we go on to classify and demarcate our fictionneers. Semantically, the word storyteller can include the word ‘author’ if not imply it. In fact, the fourth meaning according to the OED states that storyteller can be ‘applied to the writer of stories’, a use which dates back to the seventeenth century at least.122 The storyteller is not the only person who ‘tells stories’, for he shares this characteristic with a person we, in literary studies, call the novelist, or more specifically in literary criticism and theory, the author. Novelists themselves do not so easily demarcate. In a 2007 interview, Graham Swift was asked to what extent he identified himself with the traditional storyteller,123 to which he replied: It’s interesting that you use the word ‘traditional’. Your earlier question was, ‘do I see myself in a tradition?’ I guess I would say that, yes, that is one tradition I genuinely do see myself in: the tradition of the storyteller. Novels are a relatively recent, modern, sophisticated literary phenomenon but essentially they’re stories and humans have been telling stories ever since they’ve had language. It’s clearly something very deep in human nature. We need to tell stories, we need to receive stories. It’s impossible to think of a world without stories. you can never really explain what makes a perfect story it’s something mysterious, rather magical and primitive. However modern and sophisticated the novel can be, I think it’s important to hand on to that primitive sense of storytelling. It answers a deep need. I think that’s one reason why the novel will never die: it preserves the process of storytelling.124

For Swift, the novelistic tradition is not separate to the storytelling tradition but actually a continuation of the tradition, a means of ‘preserving’ the process of storytelling which we saw highlighted in various historical figures such as the epic singers of tales in Chapter 1. Swift’s answer positions the storyteller as an ancestor to the novelist, one that is not so unapproachable or distant as to prevent him from identifying himself with. Although as Atwood pointed out, the novelist and storyteller might use different mediums, Swift insists that this does not mean to say that novelist and storyteller are not doing the same thing: both are fundamentally engaged in the same business of storytelling.125 Doris Lessing also echoes this archaic and fundamental relationship that man has to storytelling, which traces back to the various storytellers through the ages. She proclaims, The human race has been telling stories since it began. Storytelling began with the songs and ceremonies of the shamans and priests, began in religion, and for thousands of years has been instructing us all. It is easy to see the process in the

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The Return of the Storyteller in Contemporary Fiction parables of the Bible. Humanity’s legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest it can be: He/she was born, lived, died. Probably that is the template of our stories – a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.126

Although these are only two examples, their message is echoed in the novelists I read in this book and reflect the relationship to the storyteller that exists in the minds of many (contemporary) writers.127 Returning to Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ then, we can see the essay as intuiting a moment in the history of the storyteller, a climax where the rise of the novel, concurrent with modernity and print, moved us away from the oral speaker who was in touch with the community of listeners. This artisan, who spoke from experience in the voice of the people, is a familiar figure throughout both Marxist and Kulturkritik traditions of dissent, but is also traceable to the traditional storyteller as the ancient bard and his community of listeners. It is in this way that the storyteller’s voice presents itself as ‘authentic’ and where Benjamin’s description of the storyteller as approaching ‘the wise man’ or ‘sage’ resonates: he is voicing one of the fundamental functions of the storyteller, that of imparting wisdoms to the people. It is not inconsequential that the mode of novelistic realism, or at least the conceptualization of it as such, arose at the moment that Benjamin proclaims the fall of the storyteller. But Benjamin’s account is also a ‘story’ in some sense. His story of the storyteller, as Kreilkamp eruditely observes, is such an established part of contemporary critical mythology that even the rise of postmodernism, with its foregrounding of stories, has been unable to open up the blinkered view of the novelist as situated in opposition to the modes and practices of the storyteller. The return of the storyteller in the postmodern is almost always a tongue-in-cheek or ironic occurrence. The loss of the modernist belief in the grand narratives of emancipation was a truth about society and progress. When the postmodern rebelled against it, its goal was not to reintroduce the storyteller, it was to reintroduce the question of relativity, multiple perspectives – in sum, no one truth. But this is precisely what the paradox of the storyteller is: to introduce ‘truths’ through fictions, multiple fictions and multiple truths. There is another paradox here surrounding the storyteller which relates to the notion of authenticity. Bringing back the storyteller, in a sense, is bringing back the authenticity of ‘voice’ and the embodied speaker to the novel. Although the

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return of the storyteller as situated in this sense constitutes a move away from the authority of authorship as removed and detached, a paradox arises because the storyteller still exudes authority. As Kreilkamp notes, the storyteller is a ‘charismatic’128 figure but, unlike his Romantic and Victorian ancestors whose historicity determined a less self-conscious and ‘naively’ authentic practice,129 he is, translated into the postmodern, post-structuralist world of stories and signs, also a figure constantly playing evasive strategies. The postmodern storyteller is one who self-consciously takes up his role. He is aware of his historicity, of his bardic ancestors and their positioning within their own historicity; although his appearance in the novel may evoke an ‘idealised speech community’,130 he knows he is telling stories in a palimpsest history: he is aware that being ‘idealised’ is simply not enough. This is what Derrida means when, in Dissemination (1981), he makes the point that (as the text is always a palimpsest that uncovers other texts behind it): reading then resembles those X-ray pictures which discover, under the epidermis of the last painting, another hidden picture, of the same painter or another painter, no matter, who would himself, for want of materials, or for a new effect, use the substance of an ancient canvas or conserves the fragment of the first sketch.131

Nevertheless, the larger project of his fictional play, one that highlights the artifice of fiction itself, has the consequence of shifting the emphasis onto story wherein the storyteller’s ‘authority’ disappears. Storytelling, precisely because it is artificial, because it is creating ‘surface’ coherences between what is told and what’s happened, is in itself an indirect way of talking about the essence underneath, or that there is an essence underneath. Perhaps this underneath points to a kind of ‘truth’ which is what Benjamin sees as inherent the story’s ‘wisdom’, something that we must safeguard against, by returning the storyteller to all our ‘fictions’.132 In all the novels examined here, the highlighting of what Rushdie has called ‘the fictionality of fiction’133 is intricately linked to each novelist’s appropriation and deployment of the storyteller in individual works. It is the insistence on the importance of story and the storyteller that they all emphasize which emerges as fundamental to man. For some of these writers, this foregrounding of storytelling is presented through the focus on oral storytelling traditions whereby the storyteller appears in a mythologized form, the romanticized storyteller of folk traditions. This particular evocation of storyteller as an ‘extra-individual’134

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teller, often highlighted by the reworking of the folktale and fairy tale, places these writers within a tradition which exists both beyond each individual and personalised telling (where) any name that becomes attached to the written version of the tale [. . .] theoretically points to the transcribe of a pre-existent narrative, and in any named sources in a collection is again simply a representative narrator of a pre-existent narrative.135

Moreover, the instability of the oral narrative which they (pretend) to appropriate in their texts – particularly representative in fairy- and folk-tale collections and the frame tale which has ‘no fixed text’ – allows them to ‘potentially add or subtract material’ which can move ‘to and from different communities and across national boundaries’.136 But even in the novels which do not consciously draw on oral and written modes to evoke the storyteller, where he is demythologized and textually generated, the novelists discussed in this book all assert in different ways a move away from the fixity of text – albeit aware that this is an illusion. In this way, they demonstrate and draw on the very performativity of fictional discourse, and its inherent artifice and it is this which allows them to present it as ‘truth’. The return to an image of the ‘embodied’ storyteller, whether mythologized and visible (as in Jim Crace) or demythologized, textually generated and ephemeral (as in J. M. Coetzee), moves us to see that there is more to the language of storytelling than the textual representation. If the postmodern is exemplified by Wittgenstein’s maxim ‘what we cannot speak of let us pass over in silence’137 and if post-structuralism has taught us, following Derrida, that there is more to language than speech and writing, then we should know that it is the process of storytelling that fills the silences and it is in the silences that the storyteller’s wisdom speaks.

Notes 1 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’. 1969 1st Shocken edn. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 2007), 83. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 As Esther Leslie observes, Benjamin’s writing is noted for its ambiguities, a detail that has led critics to label him ‘a Jewish cabalistic mystic’. See Esther Leslie,

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‘Walter Benjamin’. First Published 7 July 2001. Online Encyclopedia. The Literary Encyclopedia. http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=357. Benjamin, Illuminations, 84. Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000), 234. Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), 129. Benjamin, Illuminations, 85. Ibid., 91. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 108. Ibid. Ibid., 102. This is Kreilkamp’s term. Benjamin, Illuminations, 84. Ibid. Ibid., 87. Benjamin discusses sketchily and/or mentions briefly the following stories by Nikolai Leskov: ‘The Deception’ (89, 92); ‘The White Eagle’ (89); ‘À Propos of the Kreutzner Sonata’ (92); ‘Interesting Men’ (92); ‘The Steel Flea’ (92); ‘The Alexandrite’ (96). There is no mention of Leskov’s novels and more importantly if Benjamin regards Leskov as ‘storyteller’ in these also. (Page references refer to the essay in this instance.) Benjamin, Illuminations, 93. The essay is divided into 19 sections. Benjamin, Illuminations, 87. Benjamin’s essay presents an ambiguity concerning the positions of novelist and storyteller and the question of whether these two figures can co-exist. The fact that Leskov is both short story writer and novelist could indicate that the figure of the novelist can have a relationship to the storyteller, and thus, can be called ‘a storyteller’. However, the essay’s focus on Leskov centres on his short stories and says nothing of his work as a novelist. Benjamin does not talk about Leskov as novelist and so we don’t know whether this would apply. Furthermore, as Benjamin also ascribes a similar fate to the short story as to the novel, then we might speculate that this is more to do with what Benjamin sees as a larger phenomenon which links to his notion of isolation and the rupture in the communicability of experience, rather than in the specific terms novelist and or short-story writer. Benjamin says of the short story, ‘We have witnessed the evolution of the ‘short

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The Return of the Storyteller in Contemporary Fiction story’, which has removed itself from oral tradition and no longer permits that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers which constitutes the most appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings.’ See Benjamin, Illuminations, 93. Benjamin, Illuminations, 87. Ibid., 86. Ibid. Ibid., 87. Ibid. Ibid., 86. Ibid. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 1. I am calling this a ‘rupture’, as symbolically, this is the myth that Benjamin’s essay has subsequently gone on to perpetuate. In other words, that the oral and literary traditions are separate. See F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (Ebook: Faber and Faber, 2011). Benjamin, Illuminations, 87. Ibid. Ibid., 99. Shoshana Felman, ‘Benjamin’s Silence’, Critical Inquiry 25.2 (1999): 206. Ibid. Ibid., 205. Benjamin, Illuminations, 83. John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 277. Benjamin, Illuminations, 84. McCole, Antinomies of Tradition, 277. Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 167. This phrase is so common that any quick internet search will bring out countless examples and this is not inclusive of countless examples which are found on the back of book blurbs or in newspaper and magazine book reviews, for example. Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 46. Derek Brewer, Symbolic Stories: Traditional Narratives of the Family Drama in English Literature (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1980), 12. Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead, 46. Ibid., 48. Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, 1.

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53 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Seán Burke (ed.), Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 125–30. 54 Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, 1. 55 Nicholas Paige, ‘The Storyteller and the Book: Scenes of Narrative Production in the Early French Novel’, Modern Language Quarterly 67.2 (June 2006): 142. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Franco Moretti, ‘Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History – 1’, New Left Review 24 (2003): 82–3, qtd. in Paige, Modern Language Quarterly, 142. 59 Paige, Modern Language Quarterly, 143. 60 Paige takes issue with what Peter Brooks calls the ‘glossed, belated appearances of storytellers’ calling the reference purely ‘nostalgic’. Brooks says: ‘We may detect in (certain tales of Balzac) the desire of a novelist who has fully assumed the conditions of the modern professional writer [. . .] to recover the oral context of narrative, to be in touch again with a lived situation of exchange between narrative, narrator and narrate, creator and public.’ Similarly, Paige disagrees with Ross Chambers, who claims that ‘storytelling stands out as a way for professional writers to probe the communicative power of narrative and their own dependency on the cultural market.’ Paige argues: ‘Both Brooks and Chambers imply that fictional nineteenth-century storytellers can hardly be thought of as documentary traces of real oral narrative practice; if they registered and responded to precise historical junctures, they did so in a mediated, oblique manner.’ Paige therefore asks: ‘But when had they done anything else? Did the printed book, at any point, really offer a transparent simulation of the oral practice it was displacing? Was it ever – before the novel’s rise, if we follow Benjamin – a good faithful handmaiden to the storyteller?’ Peter Brooks, ‘The Storyteller’, Yale Journal of Criticism 1.1 (1987): 36 and Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11, qtd in Paige, Modern Language Quarterly, 144. 61 Paige, Modern Language Quarterly, 145. 62 Ibid., 168. 63 Ibid., 169. 64 Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, 8. 65 Ibid., 14. 66 Ibid., 8. 67 Ibid., 2. 68 Ibid., 3. 69 Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), qtd in Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, 6.

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70 Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, 4. 71 Rita Barnard, ‘The Storyteller, the Novelist, and the Advice Columnist: Narrative and Mass Culture in “Miss Lonelyhearts”’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 27.1 (1993): 40–61. 72 Ibid., 44. 73 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 134. 74 Ivan Kreilkamp reads Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) as indicative of a shift in thought at the turn of the century. On the one hand, Kreilkamp sees this phenomenon as positive and argues that ‘Heart of Darkness draws on this celebratory strain in thinking about sound at the end of the century, asserting that the voice without a body might offer access to philosophical and literary innovations: might even, perhaps, produce a novel of pure writing and textuality, one lacking a storyteller’. Indeed, Kreilkamp’s analysis here has a particular resonance when we think of early twentieth century modernist writers and the shift in practices towards texts which, if not entirely ‘authorless’, deliberately problematized the concept of author and authority. However, on the other, he recognizes that there was a fear there too, which Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ clearly expresses. This fear sees the artwork lose its religious aura, instead placing it into the realm of cultural consumption; and it is here where ‘Benjamin’s nostalgia for originals that we see throughout twentieth century criticism’ is born, here, equally why we see the death of storyteller and the rise of the author. Kreilkamp concludes: ‘The wonder and terror of the phonograph at this moment, then, is not that of the machine come to life as degraded and uncontrollable mass culture, but of the disembodiment of the storyteller or the charismatic speaker, the separation of the voice and the body. [. . .] In severing the link between a human agent and speech, the phonograph opened the way to a new conception of voice not as the sign of presence but as the fragmentary material phonemes of a circulating, authorless language. [. . .] It is this conception of voice, language and technology – one altogether distinct from and prior to a later modernist paradigm of “mechanical reproduction” as the abjected other of the production of high art – that Conrad puts forward in Heart of Darkness.’ See Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, 182–3. 75 Barnard, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 45. 76 Brooks, Yale Journal of Criticism, 36. 77 Irene Kacandes, Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 11. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 14. 80 Jane M. Shattuc, The Talking Cure: TV Talk Shows and Women (London; New York: Routledge, 1997).

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81 Ibid., qtd in Kacandes, Talk Fiction, 19. 82 In Chapter 5 on Salman Rushdie, we can observe this directly in my reading of Haroun and the Sea of Stories. 83 Tomlach Lakoff, Language and Woman’s Place (New York: Harper Colophon, 1975), qtd in Kacandes, Talk Fiction, 21. 84 Ibid., qtd in Kacandes, Talk Fiction, 22. 85 Kacandes, Talk Fiction, 23. 86 Ibid., 24. 87 Ibid., 29. 88 Ibid. 89 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 134. 90 I read John Barth’s novel The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991) as paradigmatic of this tendency, investigating more closely how his fiction evokes and engages with the storyteller. 91 Patricia Waugh, Practising Postmodernism Reading Modernism (London: Arnold, 1992), 4. 92 In this book we see this return and reuse of the folk tradition reflected in the novels of Rushdie, Barth and A. S. Byatt in particular. See Chapters 5, 6 and 7. 93 Stephen Benson, Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale and Theory (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 46. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid., 46–7. 96 I do not mean to imply by this that all contemporary writers engage with the folktale as a means of solely replenishing literature. Their engagement is varied as the readings in the book reveal, nevertheless with each engagement, the storyteller emerges as a figure that is employed to highlight a variety of concerns. 97 Benson, Cycles of Influence, 82. 98 Ibid., 83. 99 Ibid., 84. 100 Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 19. 101 Ibid., 20–1. 102 Ibid., xxxiv. 103 Ibid., 63. 104 Ibid., 61. 105 For a more current conception of postmodernity which interestingly, and more accurately, recognizes the differences between postmodern literatures throughout the world, see Brian McHale, ‘Afterword: Reconstructing Postmodernism’, Narrative 21.3 (2013): 357–64. In fact, the issue from which the essay is taken provides further discussion. I will be discussing postmodernism in relation to the storyteller in Chapter 6 on John Barth.

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106 David Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 29. 107 The previously widespread notion within contemporary criticism that postmodern literature began with writers such as Barth in America has now begun to be reformulated following a shift in focus which takes into account the cultural and historical factors of specific nations contextualizing their own particular ‘postmodernisms’, what McHale refers to as ‘the globalization of postmodernism’. (In other words, Barth’s postmodernism should be situated in 1950s post-war America and not necessarily be construed as coming from the same impetus as for example, Latin American postmodernist writers, or European writers such as Italo Calvino.) McHale reconceptualizes the notion of a postmodernism proposing three models from which the globalization of postmodernism might be driven. The latter of these is the most ambitious in its conceptualization but also one which, curiously, might reflect the return of the storyteller in literature. McHale postulates: ‘It might be that the world has actually reached the threshold of a genuinely global aesthetic, not explicable merely as the response to a global economic order or a shared postmodern condition (though these factors are obviously involved), nor merely the result of imitating or domesticating Western models. It might be that we find ourselves in a genuinely dialogic moment, when the cultures of the world’s regions exchange memes and models among themselves outside the center/periphery structure of either the old imperial colonialism or Western-centric cultural neocolonialism. We might imagine these intra- and interregional cultural dialogues, not routed through Western metropolitan centers but occurring among the so-called peripheries, as a series of calls and responses.’ It is this intra- and inter-cultural dialogic reflection of global postmodernism (if this really exists) which reflects what has happened over millennia in the oral storytelling tradition, which saw stories move across cultures and geographic spaces, and what now we are seeing return to written literature through the return of the storyteller in the novel. See MacHale, Narrative, 363. 108 Waugh, Practising Postmodernism, 5. 109 Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 88; see also 40, 167. 110 Waugh, Practicing Postmodernism, 164. 111 Stephen J. Gould, Life’s Grandeur: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (London: Cape, 1996), 252. 112 Simon O. Lesser, Fiction and the Unconscious (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 1. 113 Ibid., 3. 114 Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 115 Ibid., 4–5.

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116 Ibid., 13. 117 Ibid., 14. 118 See Patrick Colm Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 119 Jerome S. Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 67. 120 Benson, Cycles of Influence, 122. 121 This reference is both the title and focus of Johnathan Gotschall’s book. See Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (New York: Mariner Books, 2012). 122 The OED quote from Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly, here dated 1814. ‘These circumstances serve to explain such points of our narrative as, according to the custom of story-tellers, we deemed it fit to leave unexplained, for the purpose of exciting the reader’s curiosity.’ 123 The interviewer, Fiona Tolan, kindly asked Swift this question on my behalf. Her question was ‘To what extent do you see yourself in the role of that traditional figure of the storyteller?’ See Philip Tew, Fiona Tolan and Leigh Wilson (eds), Writers Talk: Interviews with Contemporary British Novelists (London: Continuum, 2008), 131. 124 Ibid. 125 Graham Swift’s novel Waterland (1983) best expresses Swift’s conceptualization of the storyteller. Although not part of the readings in this book, Waterland is another very good example of what this book argues is a return of the storyteller to the novel. In Swift’s Waterland we see a particular conceptualization of the storyteller which converges with Benjamin’s notion of the historyteller or ‘chronicler’ of whom Benjamin says: ‘The chronicler is the historyteller [. . .] In the storyteller the chronicler is preserved in a changed form.’ See Benjamin, Illuminations, 95–6. The novel’s protagonist is a history teacher who rather than tell ‘conventional history’ tells stories to the children in his class; the novel clearly foregrounds and problematizes the relationship between history and story, which we also see in Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1981), see Chapter 5 of this book. 126 ‘Doris Lessing on The Grandmothers.’ Interview. Harper Collins Publishers Online. www.harpercollins.com/author/authorExtra.aspx?authorID=11302&isbn13=9780 060530112&displayType=bookinterview. 127 I realize that this is a broad statement here, and is not backed up by further documentary evidence. However, as I mentioned in the introduction, during my research on the storyteller I looked at a wide range of writers and consequently, it is the conclusions drawn from this wider pool of research which leads me to make this statement here.

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128 Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, 12. 129 Kreilkamp says: ‘If the Romantic-era bard is alternately a thoroughly political embodiment of historically rooted cultural nationalist, and an emblem of a transcendent, English aesthetic, the Victorian storyteller is an apolitical – indeed, anti-political – product of a print culture that understands itself to be hegemonic.’ See ibid., 4. 130 Ibid., 15. 131 Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology. 1st edn. 1974. Trans. Gayatri Shakravotry Spivak (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), lxxv. 132 Benjamin says: ‘The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out’. See Benjamin, Illuminations, 87. 133 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991. (London: Granta Books in association with Penguin, 1992), 393. 134 Benson, Cycles of Influence, 19. 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid., 20. 137 Wittgenstein’s more archaically translated quote is ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.’ See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus. Original publication 1922 (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 108.

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3

The Birth of the Storyteller: Jim Crace’s The Gift of Stones

A great storyteller will always be rooted in the people, primarily in a milieu of craftsmen. Benjamin, Illuminations, 101 The conclusions drawn in the previous chapter from our historical investigation of the storyteller have led to a view of the storyteller as a transhistorical and transcultural figure, one who emerges as a kind of ‘archetypal’ or palimpsest figure, but one who has no traceable origins in an actual individual teller. Unlike those storytellers of old, whose tales have been immortalized through the medium of writing – Aesop, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, for example – the storyteller is most often neither named nor remembered. Reigning over an oral world, where memory was held in story-form, the storyteller’s true historical origins can only ever be approached through ‘story’. As such, any attempt to answer question surrounding the origins of the first storyteller would be based on speculation and faill into the slippery hands of fiction. This chapter begins with a reading of Jim Crace’s The Gift of Stones (1988),1 a novel that provides an answer to the unresolved questions surrounding the origins of the storyteller and thus proves to be a useful starting point for our investigation of the storyteller in this book. Set in the primitive setting of a Stone Age village community, the novel unravels the mystery surrounding the myth of the storyteller’s origins, by telling the story of the ur-storyteller, the father of all storytellers, a figure that emerges from conflict and change. We witness the storyteller as a ‘primitive’ man and archetypal figure, as well as an individual with his own unique story to tell. The novel presents us with a wounded storyteller who is an outcast, marked by a disfigurement that causes him to lose his ability

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to function as a member of the village community in which he lives. Uniquely, we learn that storytelling is linked to the physical body, but is born out of the experience of the wounded body, the body in pain. The wound marginalizes the storyteller from his community, marking him as ‘other’, and it is as a direct consequence of his otherness and his wound that he begins to tell stories, creating the necessary conditions from which the birth of the vocation of storyteller can emerge. In this sense, the novel draws parallels with Edmund Wilson’s reading of the myth of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, which portrays the artist as outcast.2 What emerges is that storytelling, the art of the storyteller, literally has the ability to save;3 it saves the storyteller from isolation and suffering, becoming a cathartic and redemptive act and, in so doing, saves both the individual and the community as a whole, proving to be instrumental to man’s survival. Storytelling is, thus, inextricably linked to the survival instinct (presented as a constant battle against death) and thus to the man’s very evolution. The Gift of Stones tells the story of the birth of storytelling and the storyteller, where storytelling becomes integral to all aspects of the narrative design, reflected in its main story, theme and deeper preoccupations. As such, it most clearly foregrounds the key ideas that surround the concept of storyteller which are explored and developed in the subsequent chapters. Narrated by the adopted daughter of the storyteller-protagonist, (who remains significantly nameless as does her father) the novel is centred on the story of the storyteller, the incidents that led him to leave his village community of stoneworkers only to return with a new craft, storytelling, which becomes more powerful than stone. The novel explores both the circumstances that lead to the birth of the storyteller, and the birth of the tradition of storytelling, reflected in his daughter’s narrative. The narrative is focused on telling the story of the storyteller, the narrator’s father, but the very act of telling this story illustrates the daughter’s own appropriation of the storyteller role and places her firmly within an emergent (oral) storytelling tradition. However, as the tradition now reaches us through the medium of the book, it is not only the daughter-narrator who appropriates the role of storyteller, but on an extra-textual level, the storyteller is also implicit in the figure of the extra-textual author, Jim Crace. These three storytellers – the main character, the narrator and Crace himself – serve to assert the significance and role of the storyteller in the novel and more widely, in terms of his importance to communities (societies). Finally, the interplay between narrative design and story urges the reader to reflect on a number of distinctions crucial to the art, practice and history of storytelling which bring us back to Benjamin and move us to explore the

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relationship between novelist and storyteller, between oral and literary traditions. Moreover, as this novel provides us with the story of the an arche-storyteller – a figure from which all other storytellers emerge – it serves as a useful starting point from which to examine to what extent the storyteller as presented in the novel embodies many of the characteristics that Benjamin ascribes to the storyteller and which we see presented in historical representations of the storyteller across history and cultures. The extent to which these charactersitics present themselves and can be used to map an understanding of the storyteller within contemporary fiction is one of the underlying aims that this book, through its readings of contemporary literature, seeks to investigate. In this light, The Gift of Stones acts as a suitable point of departure for testing Benjamin’s view of the writer as storyteller and paving the way for further investigations into the role and function of the storyteller in subsequent chapters.

The flight of an arrow The Gift of Stones is set in an unspecified village community in the Neolithic era and is significantly placed to mark the end of the Stone Age and the advent of the Bronze Age. The novel opens with the picture of a wealthy and complacent community of stoneys4 who survive by the trade of their unrivalled skills. Crace presents a community that has not yet needed to imagine another life; secure in its microcosm and in the supremacy of its craftsmanship it exists in its own version of Eden.5 Like the Neanderthals, in William Golding’s The Inheritors (1955), the stoneys have never perceived the possibility or need of change. Unthreatened and secure, in a village that was ‘obsessed with work, with industry, with craft’ (GS 9), they live in an eternal present, with no perception of past or future.6 Logically then, at the beginning of the novel, storytelling proves unnecessary and the vocation of storyteller, therefore, has not yet been conceived. However, all this is ruptured by an event that leads not only to the birth of the storyteller, but also to the end of life as they know it: the flight of a poisoned arrow. The novel’s protagonist and hero is a young boy who ventures out of the safety of the village to the nearby beach to collect scallops and is attacked by a group of horsemen, traders from a neighbouring village. Although he escapes the jeering horsemen, on returning to the village it becomes clear that he must either ‘lose an arm or die’ (GS 8), a horrific prospect considering he needs two good arms to learn his craft of working stone. The master craftsman of the village who was ‘renowned for the sharpness of his (stone) blade’ but also significantly ‘for the

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bluntness of his tongue’ (GS 13) saves the boy, and in so doing, proves both his skill and the usefulness and power of the stoneys gift of craftsmanship. The arrow is significant, appearing throughout the novel as a motif of change and transformation. Primarily, it marks the moment of change for the individual boy (destroying the trajectory to his natural vocation as stone-cutter) and premeditating the larger change that is to come at the end of the novel for the community as a whole. When the arrow returns, it is no longer made of stone and fashioned by unskilled hands, but made of bronze, a new, unknown material, one that renders the stoneys’s skills redundant. Its flight through the air at the beginning of the novel thus symbolizes the future and the coming of a new era – the Age of Bronze – which until then, the stoneys have not imagined, living as they are ‘secure as poppy seeds’ (GS 119) in an edenic, forever-present. The arrow also symbolizes death: the end of the story of the storyteller, the community and life itself. Pointed at another human being, it is no longer a tool for supplying food, but a powerful weapon. The arrow is a transformational symbol, marking the moment of rupture between old and new, and setting into motion the unfolding of all subsequent events in the novel. The fact that it comes from outside the village, coupled with the fact that it is poisoned, symbolises the necessary change in perception that both the boy and the whole village must undergo. Initially, when the wounded boy returns to the village, the villagers fail to see any form of threat. Instead, an examination of the arrow serves to further solidify their unshakeable belief in their own supremacy. The arrow head was made by an ‘amateur’ (GS 7); it is something they shake their heads and ‘laugh’ at as they pass it ‘from hand to hand’ (GS 7) as it clearly does not match the skill of their own craftsmanship. At this point in the novel, the stoneys world is still self-contained: they can see nothing outside themselves which can threaten their own self-perceived, secure reality. However, for the seven-year old boy the world has been permanently and inextricably changed. Unlike the villagers who have not perceived its danger, for him, the arrow has caused a dramatic transformation, rendering him useless to the village, unable to perform his hereditary duty of ‘working stone’ (GS 16). As Karoly Rosza suggests, ‘the arrow is something that contaminates him: the fluid poison (the dynamism of the outside world) seeps into the village through him’.7 When the boy wakes up after his amputation, although he has survived death, he is thus transformed from a useful villager to an outcast, overnight. As he says himself: ‘An arrow ruled my world; it made me what I am’ (GS 157). It is here that the boy emerges as an individual; no longer part of the community, he becomes the outsider and is immediately isolated from the security of the village.

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Prefiguring his transformation into the storyteller, Crace’s novel seems to follow Benjamin who rhetorically questions: “[Is] the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, [. . .] not in itself a craftsman’s relationship[?]”8 It is the loss of one craft, the fashioning of flint, that leads to the birth of another. As he is no longer of use to the village, the boy follows the trajectory of the arrow that points outside the village and looks out across the sea into the unknown world beyond. The world that lies beyond the safety of the community contains hardship, death and change but it is precisely this ‘real’ world, that opens up the boy to narrative possibilities and the possibility for stories. It is here, in the heath beyond, where he meets a solitary, marginalized woman named Doe. Doe is a widow who much like recent ‘amputee’ (GS 66) is both devoid of community and any useful skill and thus struggles to survive and protect herself from the harshness of the world outside. But it is this very ‘experience’ of being the outsider, of the new, which moves him to tell stories. However, when he returns to the village and begins to tell of his experiences, he is curiously selective. On recounting his first story, he realizes the importance of his audience’s reaction, a realization which reflects the interconnectedness of the storyteller and their audience: My cousins stopped eating. Their eyes were turned on me. Those phrases – ‘fill my chest’ and ‘took off down the coast’ – had made them hopeful in a way they could not understand. Those phrases were like perfume. They had dramatic odours. They promised more. I knew at once that the truth could not be told. No love, poor food, a woman – thin and naked, with breasts like barnacles – who sold herself for chickens. What could I say to make it sound attractive? They wanted something crafted and well turned. I wanted their applause. The truth would never do. It was too fragile and too glum. It offered no escape. (GS 54)

It is the recognition that this newly discovered use of language, which came from an ability to create something beyond the material world of stone, beyond the ‘truth’ of what was known, that leads him to create a new role for himself in the village, that of the village storyteller. Significantly then, the vocation of storyteller is born from transforming his experience into something other, but it is also born from exaggerating ‘truth’, from lies. ‘My father transformed his defect into a craft. As the bully becomes soldier, the meany becomes merchant, so the liar becomes bard’. (GS 66). In this sense, as Philip Tew notes ‘the tale displaces his redundancy, depending [instead] upon his flourishes, upon variation and repetition, upon untruths’.9 The storyteller emerges as one who fulfills a purpose in the village, one which as the novel progresses, becomes the most important to the village as a whole.

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In The Gift of Stones, the craft of storytelling is intricately linked to the ability to imagine, a capacity that the stoneys lacked10 and which the birth of the storyteller brings to the village. The villagers’ lack of imagination is reflected in the insular, protected nature of their village community and in the incapability of valuing anything outside their ‘gift of stones’ (GS 119), neither a future for a boy without ‘two arms’ (GS 39) to work stone nor a future without stone for themselves. As Karoly Rosza notes, ‘the village is compared to an anthill several times with its well-organized and hard-working people, its uniformity’11 and this relationship the stoneys have to work is reflective of their blinkered vision of the world. Moreover, the stoneys lack of social rituals such as drinking alcohol (which, arguably, could lead one to story-tell and use the imagination), is also of significance; these social rituals might threaten village life and lead to ‘fluidity (which) would lead to bad flint, the loss of uniformity, the development of individuality, let alone creativity’12 and break the rigid structure of the village (reflected also in the very name stoney). In this way, the villagers’ lack of imagination is juxtaposed against the discovery of and subsequent entry into the imagination by the boy-cum-storyteller. It is this new relationship to language that moves both the boy and the community towards imaginative freedom: from boy to man, and from stoney to storyteller. The capacity to tell stories (or lies) is thus presented in the novel as positive and powerful: ‘Salute the liars – they can make the real world disappear and a fresh world take its place’ (GS 64). However, the notion of lies is juxtaposed with the notion of ‘truth’ which reveals itself as a kind of ‘wisdom’ that is also present in storytelling. This is revealed near the end of novel, when the storyteller decides to stop fabricating stories, and, instead, to tell the truth. ‘This is a story made by life’, he said. ‘It’s true in every way.’ That caused some cautious laughter and some shouts. ‘You know that when I want to make your eyes stretch wide, I stretch my stories wide to match. You know that when I want some fun, I let my stories tickle truth. You know all that. You are not fools. Well, now, here is a tale that’s meant to make you weep. There is no need for camouflage. The world out there is sad enough. So this is not a dream, This, to a hair, is fact.’ He’d never heard an audience so quiet. They say and waited to be entertained by truth. (GS 124)

The storyteller here shows how outside the world of story, there is simply death and it is story that can overcome death and move one to see reality more clearly. As a key tool of the storyteller, it is imagination that provides the impetus and the possibility for change, but more than this, it is imagination and invention

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that emerges as the fundamental tool in man’s evolutionary toolbox. As Tew notes: ‘The transformative power of the imagination becomes a central theme, and this capacity allows the father to redirect the villagers, taking them beyond the limits of experience through a wisdom that is simply not contextual.’13 Initially, the storyteller’s return to the village sees the introduction of two ‘oustiders’ to the stoney clan: Doe and her child (the storyteller-narrator). These figures reflect a ‘contamination’ of sorts, in the eyes of the villagers. The fact that Doe is a ‘prostitute’ is relevant here: she literally brings in the threat of death, the seeds of other men, of the other. The stoney’s fear of change is thus experienced as a contamination of their hereditary lineage. Like the arrow, Doe’s entry into the village thus pollutes the villagers’ previously ‘pure’ nature. Despite her attempts to fit in and become a stoney, she ultimately fails and the outside world, one that has the ability ‘to pound and crush, to hammer and bruise’ (GS 82) penetrates. For the stoneys then, the attack that the boy receives, prefigures the destruction of the village at the end of the novel that points outside themselves. When the arrow returns at the end of the novel, it is made from a more powerful material: bronze. This time, the stoneys’s supremacy is redundant; they are weaponless and toolless. This time, the arrow kills. It kills the storyteller’s partner Doe, marking the death of the village and the death of stone. Death, here is both literal and metaphorical, a fiction and a reality. He describes: ‘I saw the wound deep in the shallow waist-dell of her back. I saw the arrow, too. And pulled it out. And wiped it clean. And wondered at its weight and shape and shine’ (GS 171). As Benjamin says: ‘Death is the sanction of everything the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. In other words it is to natural history that his stories refer back.’14 With their version of Eden destroyed, the stoneys are left to face the world without security of stone. In the end these workers, who ‘with two hands, were made tame, secure and virtuous by labour’ (GS 101), are rendered worthless and threatened with extinction. It is at this moment when they realize the storyteller’s importance: ‘their little liar was to be their guide’ (GS 197). Therefore, the arrow brings about positive results too. By bringing about the threat of death, it also highlights a new way forward in the quest for survival: it births the storyteller. As one technology gives birth to another, it is the craft of the storyteller which reveals itself to be the most useful one, a capacity that will never be subsumed unless man himself ceases to exist. Significantly, then, it is the inability to work stone that leads the storyteller to discover his voice and to speak. In the novel, therefore, the relationship between hand and voice is stressed; the voice that takes over the hand is described as

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working stone: ‘Watch out, you say, he’s chipping and he’s knapping at the truth. He’s shaping it to make a tale’ (GS 33). The poignancy of the situation is intensified by the fact that the amputation of the storyteller’s hand is possible only because of the remarkable dexterity of the master craftsman, but there is an irony here: it is the hand which takes away the hand, as if, as a consequence, they cancel each other out. As the hand represents the concrete labour of stonemasonry, the loss of the hand represents the displacement necessary for the ascendency of voice and of storytelling. However, the loss of the hand is symbolic in another way: the novel uncovers the archaeology of storytelling, which began with the father of all storytellers ‘in a milieu of craftsmen’,15 here the stoney community. The focus on transformation and displacement serves to further highlight the lineage that the storyteller shares with his ancestor the writer, and with it their respective relationship with their audience of listeners and readers. Hence, the collective nature of storytelling is stressed. The move from hand to voice highlights the displacement of one technology for another and it is this which, in turn, moves us to make an association between the oral storyteller and the writer, between voice and pen. In the condition of modernity it is voice which is once again displaced and the hand takes on another function, not one of gesturing as a supplement to voice, but one of crafting and transcribing or capturing voice through writing. On a metafictional level therefore, the daughter’s narrative and the novel itself reflect the craft of the writer or novelist and, as a technology which significantly takes precedence in the condition of modernity, it is in the daughter’s narrative that we see a self-consciousness, one that comes directly as a result of her experience. As Richard Lane notes: ‘The storyteller’s daughter realizes that there are limits to knowledge, that even in the shifting paradigm from stone to bronze, technology temporarily silences the fantastic: all is possible, for a while, when a new technology is born.’16 By the end of the novel, the storyteller becomes a kind of prophetic figure who the village look to for guidance taking on one of the fundamental characteristics that we see reflected in the historical storyteller: the ability to teach and present us with ‘truths’, what Benjamin might call ‘counsel’ or ‘wisdom’. In this way, as Tew notes, the storyteller’s ‘gift becomes ultimately functional since in the final episode he can only lead his tribe [. . .] from their failing village, guiding them from the transition from stone to metal.17 Without the ability to transform the mundane reality of working stone into stories, the villagers would have no record of their lives and no possibility of imagining a future: ‘The stories that he’d told were now our past. His new tale was to invent a future for us all’ (GS 202). The end of the story is the beginning of another, and although the future for the

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stoneys is unknown, what is known is that the tradition of telling and retelling stories has emerged as fundamental to the community’s survival.

Jim Crace and Benjamin’s storyteller Reading Jim Crace’s novels, one is immediately struck by his ability to create selfcontained worlds, which have a timeless quality similar to folktales and fables. As Philip Tew observes in the first critical study of Crace’s works, ‘Crace’s world is predicated on a universal quality of transhistorical values’,18 the kind of values which lend themselves more to traditional stories rather than novels, and which might direct one to identify him with Benjamin’s conception of the storyteller as personified by Leskov. The Gift of Stones is his second novel, one of ten to date which reflect this tendency towards containment. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Crace’s narrative style, with its ‘irrealist, fabulist tendency [that] challeng[es] rationality’,19 is already apparent in this early novel and has led it to be described as a kind of ‘modern [. . .] prose poem’,20 which contains a ‘moral’ or message. As Jane Smiley observes: Reading The Gift of Stones is not a ‘you are there’ experience, but a contemplative one. No tale moves forward without a hitch – the listener, the reader, is always asked to doubt what the storyteller says, or to consider the storyteller’s real intentions, or to find the larger meaning of the story.21

It is perhaps the ‘combination of beautifully rhythmic language with incredibly detailed invention’,22 that Andrew Lawless sees in Crace’s writing which lends a poetic quality to his novels that has led critics such as Ian Sansom to characterize them as ‘dramatic poetry’.23 However, it is also what Crace himself calls the ‘moralistic’24 aspect of his novels that lends credence to Tew’s description of them as approaching the ‘parabolic’.25 Indeed, the relationship that Crace’s writing has to fable, myth, parable and even allegory, all of which it has been likened to,26 is one of the ways which return us to the storyteller as Benjamin understood him, and which in turn could lead us to challenge the notion that the storyteller is decidedly different from his novelist counterpart.27 It is this relationship that I will be investigating further in this section. Although of the same generation as Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, both in terms of the critical attention his work has received and in terms of his position vis-à-vis his contemporaries, British-born Crace (b. 1946) is set slightly apart.28 Interestingly, the mythopoetic

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or fabulist quality of Crace’s writing lends him a reputation of being somewhat ‘different’ to his contemporaries. For Sean Matthews this difference is strongly conceived: Crace occupies what he labels as ‘a unique and unusual place in the contemporary canon’, which is distinct from ‘the mainstream writing in English (as his writing) bears no obvious relation to the prevailing currents and concerns of his peers.’29 Instead, Matthews likens it to non-British and nonWestern traditions, which he categorizes as ‘Continental European Writing’ or even ‘South American Writing’, a placement which moves Crace closer to the tenets of magic realism than postmodernism or self-conscious fiction, a characteristic of the writers above.30 Crace himself reiterates these ideas, both in terms of differentiating himself from contemporary writers such as Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood and J. M. Coetzee and in terms of his influences, which he sees as distinctly ‘European’ and ‘magic realist’.31 Indeed, although the fable-like quality to Crace’s writing (identified by critics above) may lack the self-consciousness which characterizes much postmodern fiction,32 there are tendencies within his writing do reflect preoccupations that link him to his peers and I would argue that it is these very tendencies that are most clearly expressed through a focus on the figure of the storyteller. Lawless, Smiley and Matthews all touch on aspects of Crace’s fiction which in many ways bring us back to the storyteller, but it is Philip Tew who expresses this more clearly. Although not directly formulating a relationship to the storyteller, Tew nevertheless correctly identifies certain key tendencies in Crace’s fiction which help us to better situate him vis-àvis his contemporaries and to trends in contemporary (British) fiction. Tew asserts: Although neither fully and experimentalist nor a postmodernist in the manner of B. S. Johnson, J. G. Ballard or Salman Rushdie, Crace mirrors the movements in the novel from the late 1970s, away from middle-class post-war realism in its apparent rejection of modernism [. . .]. Crace engages in an interfusion of traditional narrative and forms with certain modes – in Crace’s case folktales storytelling structures, fabulism, mythopoetic possibilities and a rehistoricizing of the past – that link him to his peers.33

Crace’s engagement with ‘traditional narrative and forms’34 and the turn away from realism in the novel does, as Tew suggests, align his fiction with his contemporaries. However, what I am interested here is how this turn away from modernism, and the loss of faith in realism that the contemporary novel demonstrates, return Crace, along with the five contemporary writers

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in this book, to the figure of the storyteller. As I highlighted in the previous chapter, it seems that at the moment when Benjamin proclaims the death and/or disappearance of the storyteller to what he saw as the ascension of the novelist, the novelist is in fact choosing to return to the storyteller (or, if we follow Krielkamp’s polemic for the Victorian novel, we recognize he’s always been there).35 Indeed, as I will explore in this section, Crace’s fiction seems to directly engage with many of the concerns highlighted in Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ and, as such, The Gift of Stones is paradigmatic of the return of the storyteller to the novel, demonstrating in numerous ways the literary novel’s strong relationship to the oral tradition and placing the novelist into the role of the archetypal storyteller. To look at this more closely let us now examine how the storyteller, as presented in The Gift of Stones, echoes the figure of the storyteller that Benjamin claims we have lost. In The Gift of Stones, the storyteller is presented primarily in a mythologized form. In the novel, the role and function of the storyteller in the community is stressed, echoing the many storytellers throughout the ages. We are told: He could be seen [. . .] reworking folktales for the family as the master sat at anvils and his daughter pumped the fire. You’d meet him, too, at any great occasion, celebrating with a tale the naming of a child or marking death and burial with some fitting yarn. And there were hardly any feasts or meetings of the village which did not feature father fantasizing at the higher table in the hall. (GS 73)

Moreover, as Richard Lane identifies in a short reading of the novel, in the character of the storyteller (father) we see a reflection of two archaic types of storyteller that Benjamin presents in his essay: the one embodied by the farmer, the stay-at-home storyteller or ‘resident tiller of the soil’,36 and the other by ‘the trading seaman’,37 the wanderer and traveller who collects tales along the way. Lane notes, both inside and outside his community: incapable of becoming a stoneworker because of his amputation, but still part of a stone-working family and environment, he is also a wanderer, an explorer of remote places, inspired as a child by the sight of the sailing ship that he attempts to follow along the coast.38

These images of the storyteller in the novel serve to assert the central role of the storyteller in the community, but also reflect the storyteller’s prominence in communities throughout the ages. In the novel’s presentation of the image of the transhistorical storyteller we recognize a ‘primordial storyteller’, who, as Perry Glasser notes, transcends the vision of the artisan.39

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As noted in Chapter 1, Benjamin differentiates storytelling from literature proper, or from the kind of writing that we find in the novel. For Benjamin, the storyteller (as personified in Leskov) was part of a declining minority of writer, subsumed by the trend for ‘story-less’ fiction-writing and usurped by the psychological investigations that characterize the protagonists of novels such as the Bildungsroman. In The Gift of Stones, this is strikingly apparent. The lack of psychological depth in the main characters is reflected in the way that characters in the novel are mainly known by their narratological function or by a characteristic that relates directly to an aspect of their nature. Benjamin states that the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely it is integrated into his own experience, the greater will be his inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later.40

For example, the storyteller is ‘boy’, then ‘father’ and ‘storyteller’; the master craftsman is known as ‘Leaf ’; the woman who the boy meets on the heath outside the village is ‘Doe’; and of course, the community are called ‘stoneys’. Names such as ‘Leaf ’ and ‘Doe’ urge us to look at the names symbolically or metaphorically. Leaf is characterized by his ability to exquisitely work stone; Doe is characterized by her sex and her feminine nature and, therefore, it is apt that she is hunted by predatory men and is eventually killed by a hunstman’s arrow. Similarly, the name ‘stoney’ defines the community by name and nature asserting both the importance of the stone-cutters craft and also their fixed nature. This move towards a representational interpretation of the characters is found in traditional stories and thus places the writer firmly in tradition of the storyteller. As we might remember, one of the points that Benjamin strongly presents in his essay is that the novelistic tradition was set apart from the oral tradition of storytelling. He claims: What distinguished the novel from all other forms of prose literature – the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella – is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it [and that it is this aspect which] distinguishes it from storytelling in particular.41

In The Gift of Stones, Benjamin’s notion that the two traditions are separate, as are the figures who disseminate the tradition – storyteller and novelist – is explicitly challenged. As Lane also correctly notes, Benjamin’s contradistinction between the solitary novelist ‘who sits in solipsistic silence’42 and the oral storyteller who

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is rooted in the community speaking to and for the people is proved wrong. Lane states, ‘The Gift of Stones manages to connect Benjamin’s two narrative circuits: the oral and the written; in fact these circuits interlock throughout the novel in a sequenced chiasmus.’43 Throughout the novel, oral storytelling is explicitly highlighted not only by direct references to storytelling, but also significantly through the codes of punctuation which are inscribed through the written word of the text. Indeed, the adherence to a tradition of storytelling, as opposed to novel writing, is intricately reflected in the novel and in Crace’s own beliefs about writing. Crace explains: I’m not trying to write realist books [. . .] I’m trying to write books with beautiful prose in them, which is expressed in the oral tradition, and in the oral tradition of story telling [. . .]. The real tradition of oral storytelling is all about rhythm and about hitting percussive notes, and changing the notation of prose, that’s the style of writing I employ. I couldn’t do anything else really, as I set all my books in invented places, if I started inventing idiom on top of that it would seem very false.44

The narrative’s focus on the spoken word, on oral storytelling, is foregrounded by the frequent descriptions to the act of storytelling, to voice and in the numerous references to the storyteller’s tongue (GS 11); it is also foregrounded by the use of constant repetitions, metaphors and similies, and through the descriptions of the father’s storytelling performance and finally, daughter-narrator’s own: ‘I had become a warbler in love with my own song’ (GS 127). For example, the frequent use of personal pronouns, ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘we’ bring an intimacy to the narrative that reflects a proximity of the audience. ‘Give us the details, we his audience would say’ (GS 5). Moreover, the use of direct questions – ‘What could we do?’ (GS 134); ‘What kind of life is that?’ (GS 135) – highlight the necessary dialogic relationship that storytelling practices have with the listener and listening audience, directly inviting listener (and reader) response. This produces an effect which mirrors the intimacy of the oral storytelling performance within the text; the fact that the reader is asked to participate personally in the direct call for response creates an emotional bond and invites the reader to empathize with the characters in the story. The empathetic emotion is a response which Patrick Colm Hogan sees as fundamentally forming ‘the basis of our emotional responses to literature’45 and one which arguably returns us to the embodied speaker and storyteller. Although the novel foregrounds the story of a storyteller and is concerned with the story of how he came to be a storyteller and the importance of this

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position to his village community, it is narrated by the storyteller’s daughter. The daughter narrates her own story of her father but also narrates in her father’s voice. As both these narratives are told in the first person, we are initially duped into identifying these as two distinct narrative voices. However, as the novel progresses, we realize more and more that as the father’s narrative is embedded within the daughter’s own narrative, it is the daughter who emerges as the primary storyteller, the ‘active’ and ‘present’ storyteller of the novel. Indeed, The Gift of Stones opens with the words ‘my father’ immediately asserting its place within a family tradition of storytelling, which as Pellowski notes is not only ‘one of the most universal of human experiences’ but one that is vitally important to children.46 The notion of a ‘hereditary’ tradition is implicit, the narrator-daughter telling us a story about how her own (adopted) father learnt to ‘story-tell’ and how she in turn followed suit. The novel quickly establishes this relationship to the storytelling – the ‘father’ is a storyteller – placing the narrative within this tradition where storytelling is both the subject and the mode of discourse of the narrative text. In the novel, both the storyteller and the storyteller’s daughter tell their stories to the audience directly and in the first person. The storyteller’s stories are always written between quotation marks and are followed by the lines ‘my father said’ in parenthesis. This deictic trope highlights the implicit orality of telling and voice and places the reader into the imagined position of the listener. Moreover, it also heightens the daughter’s position as the primary listener of the father’s stories, a listening that becomes a ‘lesson’ in the art of storytelling, both her father’s and her own craft: ‘If I was heir to anything it was my father’s, my father’s false tongue’ (GS 151). In this way, the novel not only provides us with the birth of the storyteller, but also with the birth of the oral storytelling tradition. Benjamin sees the storyteller as a ‘writer most deeply rooted in the people’,47 drawing his stories from experience passed on ‘from mouth to mouth’48 and thus sees the storytelling tradition as a tradition of re-telling stories. As Lane notes, ‘The relationship between the two narrators in the Gift of Stones is crucial: it is not a blood relationship as such, although the stories bind them; rather the relationship is about a repetition of stories.’49 The novel presents this through its narrative structure: the father’s stories are retold within the frame of the daughter’s own larger story. This technique, the frame narrative is often seen as a modernist device; however, significantly, it finds its roots in the oral tradition of storytelling.50 Initially, then, the daughter’s re-telling of her father’s story in her father’s voice leads us into identifying the storyteller solely with the figure of her father.

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However, it is through the repetition and re-telling of her father’s stories – ‘Listen now. I’ll tell you what my father said’ (GS 104) – that she finally recognizes her own status as storyteller. This is revealed relatively late in the novel (chapter 21 of 31) when she tells us: Perhaps now is the time to make myself clearly known to you. It will not do if I stand darkly to cough and comment at my father’s tale. It is my story too and I should show my face. You know me as my father’s daughter and his only child. All that is false. His title ‘father’ was well earned, though not by right of blood. We are not kin. (GS 102)

In this way, the daughter’s narrative accurately follows Benjamin who states, often ‘storytellers begin their story by a presentation of circumstances in which they themselves have learned what is to follow’,51 and the very act of doing this places her in the very same storytelling tradition and into the role of storyteller. Moreover, the fact that she sees the storyteller as her ‘father’ despite the fact that she is not tied to him ‘by right of blood’ equally serves to emphasize the importance she puts on her role as a daughter and storyteller. In this sense the word ‘father’ denotes her relationship to him in terms of the inheritance of a tradition. What we witness, then, is the birth of a tradition expressed through the telling of stories, and it is these stories which live on past the death of the physical body and continue through the daughter’s re-telling. The fact that she is an adopted child is of no import: the craft of storytelling, emerges as a inherent capacity within man, surpassing blood ties and hereditary skill. Her revelation at the end of the novel forefronts her own position as storyteller, which she now claims in her own right. The adherence to tradition is also reflected in the novel in the placing of the storyteller within what Benjamin has called ‘a milieu of craftsmen’,52 in the village of stoneys. The novel’s purposeful focus on craft, not only links the stoney’s craftsmanship to the crafting of stories but also serves to assert the value and prominence of the storyteller within that community. ‘He was to truth what every stoney was to untouched flint, a fashioner, a god’ (GS 56). Throughout the narrative the daughter comments on her father’s performance, instructing the reader-listener on the nature of his craft. In her own descriptions of the ‘skilful storyteller’ (GS 6), she describes how he uses his voice, his body, and the reactions of the audience to tell his tale and give it power – ‘the usual mannerisms of the storyteller, the floating eyebrow, the single, restless hand, the dramatic contours of voice’ (GS 1–2), which Benjamin recognizes as essential to the craft of the storyteller;53 in short, she tells the story of the storyteller

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performance. This demonstrates not only her own learning and appropriation of the craft, but the story of this learning journey becomes similarly instructive to the reader-listener of her own narrative, in which her father’s is framed. In this way, the novel itself becomes a kind of storyteller’s instruction manual on the art of storytelling. However the novel also provides instruction of another kind, which again returns us to the storyteller as conceived by Benjamin. Throughout the novel, the storyteller’s narratives are often sprinkled with various asides that are reminiscent of instructional sayings, ‘proverbs and maxims’54 characteristic of oral speech and which could be said to provide the type of ‘counsel’ or ‘practical advice’55 that Benjamin attributes to the storyteller. Contained in both the storyteller and his daughter’s narratives are many such phrases which are reflective of this notion of ‘folk-wisdom’. For example: ‘If only life was like a story, simpler, freer, less ordained’ (GS 59); ‘There is phrase, Whenever man and woman meet, then Mischief is the third’ (GS 145); ‘Life is a double-headed worm’ (GS 85); ‘Chance is a pear. It isn’t ripe for long. It drops. It rolls, it rots’ (GS 125). However, as well as the sprinklings of folk-wisdom that present themselves throughout the novel and which move one to see them as forms of ‘practical advice’, the broader idea of ‘counsel’, which approaches contains a ‘moral’56 or even the ‘moral of the story’57 that Benjamin claims is absent from the novel, is present in The Gift of Stones. This is most clearly reflected at the climax of the novel, when the storyteller moves from being a storytellerentertainer, to the role of storyteller-prophet, or guide, whose storytelling serves to ensure the stoneys’s survival.58 It is in the daughter’s narrative that the larger ‘moral of the story’ is revealed. The novel heeds against its own romanticization of labour as represented by the artisan community of stoney and their storyteller. This awareness is inscribed into the storyteller-daughter’s narrative, which translates into the ending of the book. However, although on the one hand, the storyteller might seem romanticized, the daughter’s narrative, inside which her father the ur-stortyeller’s is framed, provides us a mediation, a perspective from which to view the romantic figure from the outside. Hers is the perspective of the survivor, of a storyteller who has already ‘learnt’ from the moral of her father’s story. Richard Lane sees in the ‘suspicious questioning perspective’59 of the storyteller’s daughter, an awareness of rising power of modernity, an inevitable consequence perhaps of man’s technological advancement. This perspective is important, as it inscribes into the fabric of the novel a further didactic element which once again returns us to Benjamin’s storyteller.

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As the storyteller-daughter tells us, we must be wary of falling for the lull of the fable-like narrative voice – ‘beware of father’s tongue’ (GS 11) and be aware of forces outside ourselves, outside the natural rhythms of life and death, which represented by the arrow and the mercantile class, threaten to engulf us. The potentially destructive forces of modernity are not explicitly presented in the novel, but instead, work on the level of the metaphoric allowing the narrative to obtain that ‘universal’ quality which is inherent in ‘story’, that works on a variety of levels: local, national and transhistorical. It is this sense, perhaps, that moves Tew to interpret the novel as an allegory of ‘the traumatic changes endured by his adopted hometown of Birmingham when Thatcher restructured the British economy;’60 and it is equally in this sense that the novel offers counsel. When the stark reality of a dramatic change in their world order – the move from stone to bronze – hits the community, they are shown that although storytelling can help communities through this change, its imaginative escape should not blinker them to the point where reality is completely subsumed. As Tew states: the daughter’s narrative testifies to the survival of both the tribe and the act of imagination. Further, arguably, the significance of the storyteller’s narratives is that nature and the evolutionary, historical sweep become both his subject and the judge of his storytelling. Something transcends. This is no longer a ‘discrete’ human narrative, but potentially a broader one. He can become an agent of evolutionary change, an agent of history, the conduit for greater forces than himself.

The Gift of Stones, therefore, proves to be a novel that engages with Benjamin’s storyteller on a variety of levels. From the focus on the craft of the storyteller, the place and importance of his function in the community, and the universality of his stories and their ability to counsel, the storyteller emerges as one that is neither, as Benjamin professes, decidedly different to the novelist, nor is the tradition from which he comes separate to the novelistic tradition.61 Instead, their hereditary relationship is stressed in this novel, whereby we witness the storyteller as present in the character of the storyteller father, the narratordaughter and the author-novelist, Jim Crace himself. Moreover, the continuous foregrounding of the embodied storyteller, and the references to his body parts (tongue, eye, hand, arm) brings to the novel the authenticity of the voice of the charismatic speaker that has been conceived of as lost to the novel form. It is this authenticity of the voice of the embodied storyteller is set against the materiality of human technological advancements – from stone, bronze, to writing and the book. In this way, the way the novel at one and the same time

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in its mythologizing of the storyteller, also serves to assert the supremacy of his craft above all others, and over the ‘negative’ forces which come of man’s technological innovations.

The wounded storyteller The union between the two crafts of stonecutting and storytelling marks the relationship between the material and ephemeral worlds, between order and chaos. Significantly, the numerous transformations in the novel from stone to bronze, from hand to voice, are mediated through the body. It is the very loss of the storyteller’s two hands that allows him to move from the material world to the ephemeral or metaphysical: ‘My story takes shape from what has happened to my arm. With two arms I’d be knapping and too dull and chalky to tell tales’ (GS 132). However, although the loss of his hand brings with it the newly-discovered ‘gift’ of storytelling, it also marginalizes the storyteller from his community and despite the fact that he returns to it, he is always slightly set apart: ‘And so it was that my father became – not liked exactly, or respected – but useful in the village, and admired by some’ (GS 72). It is in this sense, that we are presented with the image of the storyteller as outcast or outsider and it is this aspect from which we can draw parellels with the myth of Philoctetes. In Sophocles’s drama Philoctetes (409 bc) we find one of the archetypal myths of the artist which, although not immediately apparent in the drama itself, has been famously interpreted as such in a seminal essay by Edmund Wilson, ‘The Wound and the Bow’,62 written in the early 1940s. Philoctetes, a renowned Greek archer who fought under Odysseus in the Trojan war, suffers a wound63 to his leg that is so terrible it never heals rendering him a cripple and, effectively, useless to Odysseus’s army. To his anger and dismay, he is exiled, forced to live out the remainder of his life alone on a deserted island, abandoned and in constant pain due to this never-healing wound. He remains on the island for ten years until he is saved by Neoptolemus, the envoy of Odysseus, whose initial aim is not to rescue Philoctetes but to procure Philoctetes’s magic bow. The bow had been given to him by Heracles and Neoptolemus desired it as it had been predicted by a seer that the Greeks needed in order to defeat the Trojans. However, despite tricking Philoctetes and procuring the bow, on seeing Philoctetes writhe in pain from his longsuffering wound, Neoptolemus relents, and against Odysseus’s wishes, asks him to come of his own free will. Neoptolemus’s witnessing of Philoctetes’s

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suffering leads him to realize that he must take both the man and the bow with him back to Greece. Philoctetes agrees and is healed by the surgeon Ascelpius, finally playing a deciding role in the war against the Trojans, fulfilling the seer’s prophecy. In many ways the narrative situations of The Gift of Stones are tangentially similar although not entirely parallel with those of Philoctetes making it difficult to argue that the novel is based entirely on a re-telling of the myth. For example, there is no army and no continuing war (although there are intruders who pose a threat at the beginning of the novel returning with more catastrophic consequences at the end); the boy is not banished by a specific individual (Odysseus) but does leave the village of his own free will, which constitutes a type of exile; the boy is wounded by a poisoned arrow and Philoctetes by a snake. Nevertheless, the fact that the two stories centre on the wound and the consequences of the wound is of significance and binds them together. Sophocles’s drama has been interpreted in various ways, and has intrigued scholars and writers for its singularity, particularly in relation to Philoctetes’s suffering64 and the horrifying image of the non-healing wound. Indeed, it is the wound which takes on significance in Crace’s novel, the wound which, as in the myth of Philoctetes, serves symbolically as the source of stories and moves us to see the storyteller as a ‘wounded’ man. In her ground-breaking book The Body in Pain (1985) Elaine Scarry highlights this link between the wounded body and storytelling in the myth of Philoctetes. She notes, ‘In Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the fate of an entire civilisation is suspended in order to allow the ambassadors of that civilisation to stop and take account of the nature of the human body, the wound in that body, the nature of the wound.’65 Significantly, The Gift of Stones opens with this very image. As the daughter-narrator tells us: My father’s right arm ended not in a hand, but at the elbow, in a bony swelling. Think of a pollard tree in a silhouette. That was my father’s stump. Its skin drawn tight across the bone and tucked frowning into the hole left by the missing lower joint. The indented scar was like those made in the ice by boys with stones – a small uneven puncture, wet with brackish pus. The arm was rarely dry or free from pain. (GS 1)

This bold opening image of the storyteller’s wound mirrors that of Philoctetes almost perfectly bringing the storyteller in Crace’s novel in a similar position to Philoctetes.66 For both parties, despite the passing of time, the mysterious wound never heals, nor is it ever free from pain. Moreover, as a direct consequence of

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the wound both men are rendered useless to their respective communities and subsequently cast out to suffer alone. It is this shared experience of pain that comes out of the wounded body that brings us into a deeper understanding of the figure and nature of the storyteller and to the nature of the artist as outcast, a theme that has been developed further in Chapter 4 in the reading of Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller (1990). In Philip Tew’s reading of the novel, he fails to identify this crucial point, that the transformation from stoney to storyteller is mediated through the body, specifically, through the wound and the suffering. Instead, Tew sees the boy ‘acquir(ing) his role as the storyteller only after his transformation, his abandonment of the familiar, his rite of passage in hostile conditions’.67 However, both the wound and the fact that it came as a result of poison are of paramount to the acquisition, if not discovery, of the role of storyteller. First, the wound takes on primary significance as it causes suffering, moving the boy not simply into ‘hostile conditions’, but into a life of pain. Secondly, as a transformative, almost magical substance,68 one that can bring one close to the reality of death that is a consequence of the physical body, poison leads the boy towards a new experience of reality, one that comes out of the body but is also beyond the body. If we see the wounded body as a metaphor for reality, it becomes possible to interpret that the act of telling stories from a wounded body would naturally present us with a new way of looking at reality. The mutilation and distortion of the body lead to a series of transformations are both material and metaphysical: the fall from a position of belonging to a community to a subsequent exile and/ or marginalization, the unearthing of a new way of seeing and telling the world and a new-found wisdom. In his essay, Wilson discusses the drama’s historical interpretations and retellings but it is in André Gide’s version of the drama, in his play of the same name, Philoctète (1898), that Wilson’s interpretation finds the closest parallels to The Gift of Stones. Wilson sees ‘[t]he misfortune of his exile on the island’ as a means for Philoctetes ‘to perfect himself ’,69 a perfection – only made possible as a result of his wound and the suffering – which brings with it a form of knowledge or wisdom that Wilson equates with ‘genius’.70 As Philoctetes professes, I have come to know more of the secrets of life than my masters had ever revealed to me. And I took to telling the story of my sufferings, and if the phrase was very beautiful, I was so much consoled; I even sometimes forgot my sadness by uttering it. I came to understand that words inevitably become more beautiful if they are no longer put together in response to the demands of others.71

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Notably, for Wilson it is the very act of telling the story of his suffering that the discovery of art (or the aesthetic sense) is made possible, one that comes out of the wisdom of his suffering.72 Thus, Wilson professes, Philoctetes is ‘. . . a literary man: at once a moralist and an artist, whose genius becomes purer and deeper in ratio to his isolation and outlawry.’73 Wilson’s reading sees the drama as a foundational myth of how art – the creativity and voice of the poet – compensates for the wound and consequent suffering. In this way, Wilson presents us with the myth of the artist as outcast, but it is revealed that in the end, his society needs him to lead them forward. They have to accept him with his deformity, and listen to the wisdom that he speaks, a situation that directly parallels Crace’s novel. Reflecting Wilson’s interpretation of Philoctetes, The Gift of Stones presents us with the birth of storytelling (art) and the birth of the vocation of storyteller (the poet-artist), one that comes directly out of experience of the wounded body. The revelatory capacity to story-tell, which Wilson identifies as the genius of the poetartist, can be understood as a new-found experience of language which brings about the ability to tell stories. The daughter-narrator tells us ‘My father’s talent for inflating and for telling lies was always there from birth. But no one guessed its power – until, that is, my father transformed his defect into a craft’ (GS 66). In this way, the artist as outcast – ‘this amputee, that could hold a house-hold silent with the magic of his words’ (GS 66), this ‘one-armed village story-teller’ (GS 189) – is presented in the image of the wounded storyteller, who following Philoctetes, acquires his role as a result of his wound and his suffering. Although these stories are fictitious, it is in the act of telling that the storyteller makes his lameness familiar, both to himself and so his audience of listeners. Storytelling, thus, results from a wound, from the mutilation and distortion of the physical body. The fact that for Philoctetes and the storyteller in The Gift of Stones, the wound never heals further symbolizes the fact that as long as the wound is there, the storyteller will keep on telling stories. Notably, this link between a wound and storytelling has been investigated within the field of sociology of health.74 In a study titled The Wounded Storyteller (1995), Arthur W. Frank reminds us that ‘[t]he figure of the wounded storyteller is ancient. Tiresias who reveals to Oedipus the true story of whose son he is, has been blinded by the gods. His wound gives him his narrative power.’75 Frank’s argument centres on the idea that the experience of illness creates what he calls a society of ‘wounded storytellers’ whereby the stories that ill people tell come out of their bodies. The body sets in motion the need for new stories when its disease disrupts the old stories. The body, whether

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The Return of the Storyteller in Contemporary Fiction still diseased or recovered, is simultaneously cause, topic, and instrument of whatever new stories are told.76

Frank explains that these wounded storytellers’ ‘embodied stories have two sides, one personal and one social’.77 The personal issue of telling, he claims, is ‘to give voice to the body, so that the changed body can become familiar in these stories’.78 The wounded body, an unfamiliar body, thus needs new stories to make it understandable and in so doing shows us its separateness, its move away from wholeness. In The Gift of Stones this idea is pointedly reflected. Significantly, the daughternarrator tells us on the very first page, that her father ‘would invent stories to explain the injury’ (GS 1). For example, we learn that, ‘[t]he arm was taken by a drunk and hungry traveller who mistook it for a chicken. Or it came away at his birth when the women, made impatient by their night-long vigil, tugged too hard upon it. Or it was torn free by an animal- no-one knows its name. One bite’ (GS 1–2). Moreover, near the end of the novel, the storyteller returns to the stories of his wound and hence the need to keep telling them anew is poignantly highlighted. You’ve heard each variation of the way my hand was lost; the women and the beasts, the drunk and hungry traveller who mistook it for a chicken, the cruel and giant gull. You’re tired of the talking goose, the magic dog, the travelling stench, the boy who had the gift of flames. You’re ready for some freshly fashioned tale. (GS 158)

Although these stories are by their very nature fictitious, it is in the act of telling them – a form of ‘invention’ – that the storyteller makes his lameness familiar, both to himself and to his audience. The storyteller, an outcast due to his deformity, becomes useful by telling stories. He teaches the ‘unfamiliar’ stoneys about what is familiar to him, what he has learnt physically through his body, which came about through his direct relationship to the wound and pain. As Frank notes, The wound that the biblical patriarch Jacob suffers to his hip while wrestling with the angel is part of the story he tells of the event, and it is the price of his story. As Jacob tells his story to those he returns to – and who else could have told it? – his wound is evidence of his story’s truth.79

Another aspect of the wound is thus related to the storyteller’s relationship to his audience. The social aspect of telling stories, Frank observes, ‘is that they

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are told to someone, whether that other person is immediately present or not’.80 For Frank, the potential for a reader (or listener) is as important as the real and present reader to whom the storyteller tells his story. Frank continues: Even messages in a bottle imply a potential reader. The less evident social aspect of stories is that people do not make up their stories by themselves. The shape of the telling is molded by all the rhetorical expectations that the storyteller has been internalizing.81

Frank’s second observation seems even more pertinent in its evocation of the storyteller as a wounded man. With Philoctetes we see this clearly: the pain and suffering his wound causes is at first dismissed but later acknowledged by Neoptolemus, who recognizes the need for Philoctetes’s story and for his wisdom. Although the audience is not initially ready to listen to this story, Neoptolemus’s return and his heeding of the oracle’s insistence that they need Philoctetes and not simply his bow in order to defeat Troy, suggests that it is the telling of his story that is of import: the bow, symbolic of the power of stories, is useless without its owner, just as stories need a storyteller to make them come alive. In The Gift of Stones we can see the social aspect of storytelling reflected in the interaction between the storyteller and his primary audience, represented by the community of stonecutters. In various ways throughout the novel, this relationship is documented and thus foregrounded both in the storyteller’s narratives and in the daughter’s commentaries of them. For example, we see this primarily, as I mentioned in an earlier example, in the storyteller’s first person narratives, when the storyteller first returns to the village from his travels and he describes how he altered his tale to gain the attention of his listeners. But we also see this in the daughter’s narratives. She further emphasizes the audience’s importance to storytelling not only providing evidence through the recounting of her father’s first-person narratives, but by directly telling us herself: ‘My father soon became adept at shaping what he said to the shiny eyes of listeners’ (GS 67). Moreover, the storyteller’s proximity to the audience and their interdependence is expressed by use of the second-person pronoun ‘you’. This direct address suggests a level of familiarity, one which serves the function of allowing the storyteller to draw the audience in further highlighting the necessary and intimate relationship of the audience to the storyteller. In fact, the story of the boy’s mutilation, acts as a catalyst for the creation of new stories, stories that serve to further establish the storytelling relationship between the storyteller and his audience, through the co-construction of a shared experience.

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For example, in recounting how the boy spent his days after the tragic loss of his arm, we see the storyteller self-consciously crafting his tale to suit his audience. I promised you there’d be no lies, but you’ll excuse the excursions and short cuts. What is the profit in listing here the countless days I fled the cursing of my uncle and my cousins to laze about the village staring idly into other people’s lives? Days spent idly doing nothing could slow this story down. You’d fall asleep, you’d topple to the ground, if I told you that. You’d dislocate your jaw with yawns if I recounted here the casual, endless rebuffs upon which my boyish indignation fed. I stalked the village like a homeless pup, untamed, unnoticed, empty, cold, uncombed and loved by no-one but myself. (GS 40)

This storytelling relationship may be formed by the story of the storyteller’s suffering, but if the storyteller is not able to tell it in a way that beguiles and captures the attention of his listeners, then the stories become useless and lose their redemptive power. Frank explains: The ill, and those who suffer, can also be healers. Their injuries become the source of the potency of their stories. Through their stories, the ill create empathic bonds between themselves and their listeners. These bonds expand as the stories are retold. Those who listened then tell others, and the circle of shared experience widens.82

This relationship between the storyteller and the audience returns us to Benjamin’s notion of experience, which is central to the storyteller and his craft, who tells us, ‘Storytellers tend to begin their story with a presentation of the circumstances in which they themselves have learned what is to follow, unless they simply pass it off as their own experience.’83 Indeed, ‘experience’ is reflected both in the storyteller’s story, told to us in the first person, as well as in the daughter’s re-telling of his story in which his narrative is embedded. Thus, in The Gift of Stones we see the wound literally transforming into story, into ‘something useful’84 (another of Benjamin’s distinctions for true storytelling) before our eyes. And here, of course, if there were children in his audience, my father would not resist the obvious embellishment of his tale, that was his fate too. They cooked his raw and living flesh over the fire and removed his poisoned arm with forty bites. There were the teeth marks still. He would present his puckered stump – not too slowly, not too close. And, indeed, you thought you saw the logic to his lies – those indentations, those pussy fissures and frowning scars could be the work of mouths. (GS 12–13)

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Significantly, then, the power of this shared experience of storytelling is actually able to transform: through telling the story the storyteller is healed and thus, as Frank observes ‘because stories can heal, the wounded healer and wounded storyteller are not separate, but are different aspects of the same figure’.85 In this way the illness or suffering becomes ‘the occasion of a journey that becomes a quest’ with the quest being defined ‘by the ill person’s belief that something is to be gained through the experience’.86 Quest narratives involve an initiation, a transformation – ‘imply(ing) the teller has been given something by the experience’ – and a return where the teller ‘remains marked by illness’ but is somehow ‘different’ and having gained ‘knowledge’,87 a type of knowledge that can also be aligned to empathy and emotion.88 The fact that the wounded body leads the sufferer to speak and share the story and the listener through the act of listening experiences the story and in this way they both find liberation and wisdom. Although at first there is no language for pain, the wounded body necessitates the person to tell its story: hence Frank’s dubbing of these sufferers as ‘wounded storytellers’. In the novel, this is poignantly reflected in the storyteller’s story, but also significantly, in the story of the narrator and daughter, who we are told was also sick as a child. In this way, her story is also revealed to follow her father’s, but also one of the wounded storyteller. However, interestingly, the act of (re-)telling of the experience of the wound is also mirrored on an extra-textual level. As Tew discloses, Crace’s father suffered from a condition whose description is strikingly similar to the storyteller (and Philoctetes’s) wound. Tew explains: This suppuration is biographically suggestive, as it echoes the medical condition of Crace’s father, who contracted osteomylitis aged eleven in 1922, effectively ending his education. He suffered muscle wastage in his left arm, thereafter stiff and periodically weeping wounds left by the boils and lesions.89

Echoing Benjamin, whereby the storyteller tells from either his own or other’s experience, Crace’s narrative reveals that even on a extra-textual level, Crace as novelist, can be placed within the tradition of the storyteller. In this way, the shared experience of healing has now for Crace and his father, as for the daughter and her storyteller father, has been achieved through the very act of storytelling, of becoming a storyteller. The Gift of Stones not only demonstrates the significant relationship that Benjamin rightly reminds us exists within the storytelling tradition – that of re-telling stories – but more importantly, it reveals the very act of story/retelling as intricately bound to the experience of the (wounded) body, (or the body in

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pain). Essentially then, the birth of the storyteller reveals that it is to be a birth of the story of the body, of our humanity; however, it is not the idealized body that we are confronted with, but our real, fragile physical body, the body that suffers wounds, that heals but that also dies. The body, from which both the story and the voice emanates, emphasizes our humanity thereby placing ‘the tiny, fragile, human body’90 firmly into the natural order of life and death and regeneration; and it is here where the story of the storyteller is born. Crace’s storytellers return us through the medium of the novel to the primal order of the natural world; and it is this aspect of his fiction that leads Sansom to say: ‘Reading Crace is like [. . .] an evening class with an urban shaman, an education in the stuff of life: a beginner’s guide to earth, fire, air and water.’91 Crace’s novel reveals that the evolutionary capacity that is present in storytelling does not simply operate, as Tew suggests, as a ‘concept of adaptation’,92 but rather operates as an instrument intricately linked to our survival. It is in this sense, that the return of the storyteller as represented within Crace’s novel as an embodied figure takes on an even greater poignancy.

Notes 1 Jim Crace, The Gift of Stones (London: Secker & Warburg, 1988). All subsequent intext quotations in this chapter are taken from this edition and will appear in the text in the abbreviated form GS followed by the page number. 2 409 bc is the date when the play was first premiered in Athens. 3 This ability of storytelling as a redemptive act, and one that can save from death is investigated in relation to Scheherazade, the frame-narrator of The Arabian Nights, which features in the readings of a number of novels in this book. See Chapters 5, 6 and 7 in particular. 4 Crace’s term for the community of stonecutters to whom the main character belongs. 5 The move from Stone to Bronze reminds us of the ‘Ages of Man’, alluded to by the Greek Hesiod as being five (the Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age), and in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses (8 ad) as being four (missing out the Heroic Age). The presentation of village life in this novel links to the Golden Age and to Arcadia (utopia) and Eden and its subsequent fall into either an Age of Bronze or out of paradise. 6 The presentation of the village in this eternal present erases the need for cultural memory, which is a necessary condition of and foundation to storytelling and the storyteller. 7 Karoly Rozsa, ‘The Gift of Stories’, 2002. www.jim-crace.com/Rozsa%20paper.htm.

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8 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’. 1969 1st Shocken edn. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 2007), 101. 9 Philip Tew, Jim Crace (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 69. 10 See the quote above which reflects this, which refers to Leaf and the bluntness of his tongue. 11 Karoly Rozsa, ‘The Gift of Stories’, 2002. www.jim-crace.com/Rozsa%20paper.htm. 12 Ibid. 13 Tew, Jim Crace, 66. 14 Benjamin, Illuminations, 94. 15 Ibid., 101. 16 Lane, Richard J. ‘The Fiction of Jim Crace: Narrative and Recovery’, in Philip Tew, Richard Lane, Rod Lingham (eds), The Contemporary British Fiction (London: Continuum, 2004), 30. 17 Tew, Jim Crace, 69. 18 Ibid., 62. 19 Ibid., 67. 20 Jane Smiley, ‘What Is This Thing Called Bronze?’ The New York Times. 16 July 1989. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE0DA103AF935A25754C0A 96F948260. 21 Ibid. (Smiley, The New York Times.) 22 Andrew Lawless, ‘The Poet of Prose: Jim Crace in Interview’. Three Monkeys Online. February 2005. www.threemonkeysonline.com/the-poet-of-prose-jim-crace-ininterview/. 23 Ian Sansom, ‘Smorgasbits’. London Review of Books, 2001. www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n22/ ian-sansom/smorgasbits. 24 Lawless, Three Monkeys Online. 25 Tew quotes J. Hillis Miller’s definition of a parabolic narrative which he says is ‘in some way governed, at its origin and its end, by the infinitely distant and invisible, by something that transcends altogether direct presentation. The correspondence between what is given in parable – the ‘realistic’ story represented in a literal language – and its meaning is more indirect than is the case, for example in symbolic expression. J. Hillis Miller. Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth Century Literature (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 136, qtd in Tew, Jim Crace, 42. 26 Gillian Greenwood describes: ‘Jim Crace’s form, to which he has clearly given some thought, is tinged with fantasy [. . .] for the most part he fuses folklore and political parable, moral fable and myth, into something rather original and also very modern in its fragmentation.’ See Gillian Greenwood, ‘The Geography of Bleak new Worlds.’ The Times (16 October 1986): 19, qtd in Tew, Jim Crace, 23. 27 Benjamin, Illuminations, 87.

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28 Critical attention in Crace’s work is growing. Moreover, his emergence as a significant figure in contemporary British fiction is acknowledged in part by the array of literary accolades Crace has received to date. Following the awarding of three prizes for his first novel Continent Crace went on to receive the Premio Antico Fattore (Italy) in 1988. For The Gift of Stones he won The GAP International Prize for Fiction (USA) in 1989, and three years later, in 1992, he was awarded the E. M. Forster Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1995 he was awarded the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for Signals of Distress and had two novels short listed for the Booker Prize in 1997 and 1999 respectively (Quarantine (1997) and Being Dead (1999)). Finally his novel Being Dead won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1997 and The National Book Critics’ Circle Fiction Award (USA) in 1999 as well as being short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. 29 Sean Matthews, ‘Jim Crace’. British Council Arts, 2004. http://literature. britishcouncil.org/jim-crace. 30 I use these terms ‘lightly’ as I am not entirely in agreement with the broad categorization of postmodernist literature, nor with ‘magic realism’ for that matter. However, this said, in terms of literary critical history, these terms are inescapable and therefore necessary. For a discussion of postmodern fiction and for a clearer placing of how ‘magic realist’ texts might be conceived in relation to the influence of the postmodern in Latin American, see Chapters 2 and 5 of this book and see Brian McHale, ‘Afterword: Reconstructing Postmodernism’, Narrative 21.3 (2013): 357–64. 31 Crace has said: ‘I’m not claiming to be Philip Roth, or Ian McEwan, with a very long span and a promising future. Or Margaret Atwood or J. M. Coetzee. Those writers are almost beyond being criticised. I’m not one of those writers.’ ‘I don’t write out of other books, but I do feel European, and I do read a lot of European writers. Günther Grass is someone I admire greatly, along with Calvino and Primo Levi. Less so Kundera, more so the Latin American magical realists.’ See Lawless, Three Monkeys Online. 32 I have already noted that this term as it relates to literary fiction is problematic. 33 Tew, Jim Crace, 24. 34 Ibid. 35 See Chapter 2 of this book chapter one of Ivan Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 36 Benjamin, Illuminations, 84–5. 37 Ibid., 85. 38 Richard J. Lane, ‘The Fiction of Jim Crace: Narrative and Recovery’, in Philip Tew (ed.), The Contemporary British Novel (London: Continuum, 2004), 29. 39 Perry Glasser, ‘A Stone-Age Storyteller Speaks from the Dawn of Narrative Art’. Chicago Tribune Books. (16 April 1989) 6. Qtd in Tew, Jim Crace, 65. 40 Benjamin, Illuminations, 91.

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54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61

62

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Ibid., 87. Lane, Contemporary British Writers, 29. Ibid., 30. Lawless, Three Monkeys Online. Patrick Colm Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 36. Anne Pellowski, The World of Storytelling. Expanded and rev. edn. (Bronx: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1990), 67. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 84. Lane, Contemporary British Novelists, 30. For example, in the frame-tale literature I mentioned in Chapter 1, such as, The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, The Arabian Nights. Benjamin, Illuminations, 92. Ibid., 101. Benjamin says ‘After all, storytelling, in its sensory aspect, is by no means a job for the voice alone. Rather, in genuine storytelling the hand plays a part which supports what is expressed in a hundred ways with its gestures trained by work.’ See Benjamin, Illuminations, 108. Ibid., 86. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 99. Interestingly, the idea of Crace’s novels contain ‘lessons’ has been noted by Ian Sansom who claims that they end with ‘a moral on the tip of [their] tongue’. Crace agrees with this interpretation in a later interview with Andrew Lawless, observing that Sansom’s description was ‘spot on’ and reiterating, ‘I am moralistic and I do lecture in my books.’ See Sansom, London Review of Books and Lawless, Three Monkeys Online. Lane, Contemporary British Novelists, 30. Tew, Jim Crace, 61. Benjamin says: ‘What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense) is its essential dependence on the book. [. . .] What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature – the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella – is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it.’ See Benjamin, Illuminations, 87. This essay was first published in 1941 by The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Massuchusetts. All subsequent in-text quotations will use the following edition. Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (London: W. H. Allen, 1952).

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63 The cause of the wound is not always consistent in the various accounts of the myth, though a common one is that this was caused by a snake bite. 64 This suffering aligns itself with the modern conception of trauma (which actually means wound in Greek) and implies both psychological as well as physiological symptoms. 65 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 10. 66 As Wilson reminds us, Philoctetes’s wound becomes so virulently infected that he began to groan and produce ‘ill-omened sounds [. . . and] the bite began to suppurate with so horrible a smell that his companions could not bear to have him near them.’ See Wilson, The Wound and the Bow 247 which is taken from the original (translated) text by Sophocles. 67 Tew, Jim Crace, 68. 68 Poison has been seen to have mystical properties. In the myth of Philoctetes this aspect is highlighted by the fact that Philoctetes is bitten by a snake that lay at the foot of an altar to the Gods, indicating perhaps that Philoctetes had angered them in some way. Moreover, the snake in Hellenic mythology symbolizes both medicine and wisdom. 69 Wilson, The Wound and the Bow, 258. 70 Wilson’s notion of ‘genius’ seems to follow what postmodernist critics for example, now see as ‘romantic’ mythology. The concept of genius, which has traditionally been regarded as a type of divine madness (i.e. Nietzsche – Birth of Tragedy) is interesting to consider here in relation to the birth of the storyteller, who is presented as being born from suffering which in Benjaminian terms might approach the ‘wisdom’ or ‘counsel’ he professes is to be found in stories. However, the conception of genius in contemporary criticism as Timothy Clark notes ‘no longer commands intellectual respect.’ See Clark, Theory of Inspiration, 9. 71 Wilson, The Wound and the Bow, 258–9. 72 Wilson recognizes the fact that ‘to the modern reader: the idea that genius and disease, like strength and mutilation, may be inextricably bound together’. See Wilson, The Wound and the Bow, 259. 73 Ibid. 74 Elaine Scarry’s book is also an example of this. 75 Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), xi. For further reading into this area of research and in particular of how individuals self-construct narratives of health, see Ulla Gustafsson and Sarah Nettleton, The Sociology of Health and Illness Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002) and Sarah Nettleton, The Sociology of Health and Illness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). 76 Ibid., 2. 77 Ibid.

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85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

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Ibid. Ibid., xi. Ibid., 3. Ibid. Ibid., xi. Benjamin, Illuminations, 92. Ibid., 86. Benjamin says: ‘. . . the nature of every true story [. . .] contains, openly or covertly, something useful. This usefulness may, in one case, consist in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or a maxim. In every case, the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.’ Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, xi. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 118. See Hogan, footnote 44 above. Tew, Jim Crace, 9. Benjamin, Illuminations, 84. Sansom, London Review of Books. Tew, Jim Crace, 69.

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4

Storyteller as Outcast: Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller

My foot was so swollen it looked as if it were somebody else’s. Was I changing into a monster? [. . .] in my sleep I kept hearing parrots chattering and laughing [. . .] Were they making mock of me? Saying: You’ll never leave here storyteller. In a trembling voice I asked: ‘Are you making fun of me?’ ‘I’m telling the truth,’ the parrot insisted [. . .] ‘You’ve had to get a thorn stuck in you to discover your companions, storyteller. Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller, 227–8 Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller (1990)1 is preoccupied with the question of ‘what it is to be a storyteller’2 (in Peter Standish’s words) and what it means to be a novelist in the context of a late twentieth-century (postmodern) world. Narrated by an anonymous Peruvian writer (reminiscent of the author, Vargas Llosa) the novel is concerned with his quest to track down and identify the storyteller of an elusive, primitive tribe, the Machiguengas, of the Peruvian Amazon. As the storyteller’s narratives are embedded within the narrator’s quest to discover his identity, the novel presents a juxtaposition of writer-novelist visà-vis the primitive storyteller within the novel’s fictional frame. Moreover, in its movement between periods of time and continents, the novel’s transcultural and transnational positioning of these figures urges an investigation of these roles from both a micro- (local) and macro- (global) perspective. In The Storyteller, the protagonist is an outsider from birth, both in terms of his nationality (a Jew in Peru) but also due to a ghastly facial disfigurement. As with Crace’s storyteller in The Gift of Stones, we are presented with an image of the storyteller as a marginal figure. Rejecting the world in which he has been brought up, that of postcolonial, late twentieth-century Lima, the protagonist

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finds a home and his true vocation in the Peruvian jungle as the wandering, oral storyteller of an indigenous tribe. This idea of ‘otherness’ from the storyteller’s home community, re-emerges in this novel and once again takes on primary importance: marginalization and otherness leads to the vocation of storyteller. By returning the storyteller to this primitive tribe, the novel leads us to question not only our constructions of nationhood or ethnos, between local, national, western and primitive communities and cultures, but also how these categories fundamentally shape our constructions of reality and our communal ‘truths’ through our stories. However, as the Machiguenga storyteller and the other storyteller figures of the novel (narrator, novelist, extra-textual author) reveal themselves as simply fictional constructs, and thus ultimately unreliable, the larger question is whether fictions can provide our truths in the first place. Vargas Llosa’s novel differs from Crace’s return to the imaginary storyteller of premodern societies, in its juxtaposition of the primitive with the modern (or postmodern) twentieth century. Set in very real historical places and times – the narrative moves between Florence, Lima and the Amazon between the years 1956 and 1987 – the novel conforms (in part) to the tenets of novelistic realism standing somewhere between memoir and literary detective story. The novel problematizes the roles of novelist and storyteller through its complex interplay of written and oral storytelling modes. Moreover, the fact that the narrator draws attention both to the style and mode of his narrative, and employs a variety of intertextual references which are intricately related to the themes and questions which the text explores, is a departure from the unself-conscious fabulism of The Gift of Stones and an embracing of the kind of self-consciousness that (broadly) characterizes postmodern fiction.3 One of the central issues that The Storyteller seeks to examine is, therefore, played out in this relationship between the implicit novelist-narrator and the ancient, archetypal storyteller and their positions in relation to their storytelling practices and to their function and place in the community. This problem is also an abiding concern of this book and Vargas Llosa’s novel offers a sure investigation into the relationship between these two figures. The novel presents us with two distinct narrative modes: a written ‘memoir’ of the narrator’s search for the Machiguenga storyteller, and a ‘transcription’ of the oral stories of the Machiguenga storyteller (as told to his tribe). Indeed, the complex interplay between the positions of novelist-author and tribal storyteller initially raises questions about their roles, natures, identities and influences. In order to find out who they are, whether they are distinct characters, and the precise nature of the relationship between them, we are led to look more closely at the traditions

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that have created them. How do these two narrative traditions influence the way in which their respective tellers – novelist and storyteller – tell their stories? More importantly, what is it about the nature of each tradition that makes them distinct or brings them closer together? These are the questions that the novel seeks to answer and in this way, Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller not only directly engages with but also offers a direct response to Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’. On one level the novel conforms to the romantic image of the storyteller. We are solicited to witness the drama that unfolds when the storyteller, a figure who belongs to a real and living indigenous community, a threatened people, is pushed further and further into the margins by a rising and terrifying modernity. From this perspective, The Storyteller returns to the theme of storytelling for survival, but also echoes Benjamin’s early twentieth-century warning that the loss of the storyteller would be detrimental to society, as if society had stopped moving forward and would now enter into an infinite regress. However, on another level, just as the novel sets this up, it equally highlights an inherent romanticism in redeploying and representing the (fantasy of) the tribal storyteller of the ‘indigenous’ tribe, who untouched by civilization is still wandering in the depths of the jungle, telling stories. The novel, thus raises a more important question: can the novelist be a storyteller or does the return to a romanticized and mythologized image of the storyteller really suggest a nostalgic fantasy which breaks under close scrutiny?

The meeting of worlds: Novelist and storyteller The Storyteller is not a linear narrative and contains a complex web of stories within stories, where narratives reveal themselves slowly within various embedded fictional frames. It is these fictional frames, and the relation between the narratives that lead us to a series of unmaskings,4 both in terms of the storyteller’s identity, and in terms of the stories we are told by the storyteller(s) in the novel. These unmasking events are linked to the identity of the storyteller in the novel, whom the narrator suspects might be an old university friend of his called Saúl Zuratas. In the narrator’s recollections Saúl is an ambiguous and elusive individual, whose nickname Mascarita (translated as ‘Mask Face’, but literally meaning ‘little mask’ in Spanish)5 is reflective of the novel’s interplay of narrative masks. In the novel, Mascarita’s mask is both literal and metaphorical: as we peel back the layers, we find Saúl, the Machiguenga storyteller, the anonymous novelist narrator and on an extra-textual level, Vargas Llosa himself.

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Within the first few pages of the novel our narrator presents us with an image of the tribal storyteller, whose communal, oral art thus sets itself in direct opposition to his own written, literate and solitary writing practice. Having come to Florence ‘to read Dante and Machiavelli and look at Renaissance paintings for a couple of months in absolute solitude’ (S 4), a chosen exile from his native Peru, the anonymous narrator is forced to abandon his plans prematurely and return metaphorically through the telling of the story we are reading. This return is triggered by a photograph he chances upon in a window display of a small gallery exhibiting photographs of ‘The Native of the Amazonian Forest’ which depicts a ‘gathering of men and women, sitting in a circle in the Amazonian way – similar to the Oriental: legs crossed tailor-fashion, back held very straight – and bathed in the light of dusk falling’ (S 4). The photograph is striking not only because the narrator is familiar with the particular tribe the Machiguengas, having visited them in his youth, but essentially because in the image of the Machiguenga storyteller he recognizes his old friend Saúl Zuratas.6 The narrative is thus instigated by the narrator’s quest to find whether the identity of the Machiguenga storyteller (as representative of community) rests in the figure of Saúl (as representative of the individual). What is therefore of key significance in this novel is that, rather than leave the storyteller where he is, in a primitive, romanticized past where storytelling represents communal truths, the novelist seeks to uncover the identity of the storyteller as an individual teller. In this way, communal and individual truths as presented within the larger frame of the storytelling tradition are juxtaposed, as implicitly are the practices of the oral storyteller and the writerly author. In the placing of Saúl in the figure of the Machiguenga storyteller, Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller presents us with a story of the birth of a storyteller (as distinct from Crace’s ur-stortyeller). Moreover, the fact that Saúl moves from a modern society and literate and educated social position to primitive, premodern and illiterate one urges us to question the larger motives of his actions. The novel is constructed around what Jean O’Bryant Knight has described as ‘two narrative situations’.7 Outside the frame story, which introduces us to the narrator and his subsequent narrative quest to find the storyteller, Chapters 2, 4 and 6 make up the first of these narrative situations. These begin with the narrator’s recollections of his meetings with Saúl during their years together at university and then go on to trace the story of Saúl until his disappearance. As a narrative of exploration and discovery, the narrator’s retrospective narrative takes us through the jungles of memory and time. The second narrative situation employed by Vargas Llosa’s novel seeks to answer these questions. It takes up

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Chapters 3, 5 and 7 of the novel and is written in the voice of the Machiguenga storyteller telling his stories to the tribe. Following the true storytelling tradition, the storyteller tells the larger story of the Machiguengas to the various settlements that live scattered through the jungle and in so doing brings the various settlements together into a unified community. Although initially the two narrative situations appear to be distinct in form and content,8 as the novel progresses, the relationship between the two points towards an identification of the storyteller with the character of Saúl. However, this positioning is not altogether reliable. On one level, the merging of the narratives and figures into one unified image of the storyteller bring the oral and literate traditions together, suggesting, perhaps a continuing tradition rather than two separate ones. In this sense, The Storyteller, as Keith Booker notes, ‘addresses the role that literature plays in the Utopian tradition’.9 On the other hand, the knowledge that the storyteller’s story is embedded within the narrative and thus ‘an imagined’ and fictional construct of the narrator (and on an extratextual level as is the narrator also) causes a rupture to the authenticity of any of the storyteller figures in the novel and leads us to question any any such utopian strain. As Booker also notes ‘in Vargas Llosa Utopia is never realized’,10 a fact that indicates that his return to the primitive storyteller is not inauthentic and is fictitious for a purpose. The questioning of the roles of novelist and storyteller begin in the frame narrative and are brought to the fore from the opening of the novel. First, the narrator’s task ‘to read Dante and Machiavelli in absolute solitude’ serves to highlight the narrator’s position as a scholar. But the ensuing narrative, which is presented as a memoir of sorts, moves back in time and into two further narrative situations, the narrator’s memories of Saúl and the transcription of the Machiguenga storyteller’s (again Saúl’s) ‘orally’ told stories. Moreover, as the narrator self-consciously points to the fact that he does not know how to write and portray the storyteller’s narratives ‘authentically’ through the mode of writing, his admission places both narratives within the frame of a piece of written fiction and thus within a novel and consequently places the narrator into the role of novelist. As a result, in the figure of the narrator, the roles of scholar and novelist converge and their ‘solitary’ practices of reading and writing are starkly juxtaposed to the communal art of the ‘primitive’, premodern and illiterate storyteller, a contrast which is confounded by the novelist’s confrontation with the photograph. The depiction of the tribal storyteller surrounded by his ‘attentive’ community of listeners, their distinctive way of sitting and the reference to Oriental tellers, leads us back through time to visualize similar groups who

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have done the same throughout the ages.11 Storytelling, unlike fiction writing, is presented as immediate, purposeful and central to the community, a fact that is highlighted by the image of the storyteller in the photograph encircled by his audience of listeners. The novelist’s position vis-à-vis his audience is, therefore, brought into question. In the first of his many literary links, the narrator’s entry into narratives, presented as a series of memories, is reminiscent of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and takes us back to Enlightenment philosophy and to Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’. This representation of ‘the noble savage’ is problematized throughout the novel and rests in the figure of the tribal storyteller, and also in the individual person, Saúl.12 Conrad’s narrative similarly begins with a storyteller surrounded by a circle of listeners. The Storyteller echoes this through the image of the tribal storyteller in the photograph who is presented significantly, as a figure that fascinates and alarms him. The fact that the photograph causes these conflicting emotions – ‘anxiety’ (S 5) and ‘excitement’ (S 6) – is related to what Kreilkamp reads as the message of Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Storyteller’. He notes that ‘Benjamin’s analysis of the attenuation of storytelling relies on an argument about the individual and collective memory’,13 a situation which the narrator-cumnovelist of The Storyteller perfectly encapsulates. We might question then: as the image of the storyteller (a representation of collective memory) is the inspiration for the narrative that thus ensues (a narrative of an individual memory), is this enough to conclude that the whole narrative is a representation of the novelist’s desire to return to storyteller that Benjamin evokes? The answer to this question is in many ways what the larger narrative project of The Storyteller is concerned with. In fact, it is the evocation of the primitive, tribal storyteller, lost in the jungles of time and memory, which the novel seeks in many ways to return to. Indeed, from the very opening of the novel, in which the novelist-narrator is confronted with the photograph of the tribal storyteller, this question is brought to the fore. Here, the narrator specifically tells us that the photograph of the storyteller is presented ‘without demagoguery or aestheticism’ (S 5), a statement which prompts the reader to consider more closely the question of ‘art’ (aestheticism) in relation to the figure of the storyteller, and implicitly, the writer or novelist. Storytelling, as Benjamin notes, is ‘an artisan form of communication’,14 and the storyteller does present himself as a kind of ‘leader’ of the tribe through his ‘counsel’. However, an artisan is not the same as an aesthete, nor is a ‘wise’ man the same as a ‘demagogue’. The narrator’s remarks, therefore, lead one to question, by implication, the role of the novelist, the modern ‘successor’ of the storyteller. Is the novelist a ‘demagogue’, a leader who obtains power by

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means of impassioned appeals to the emotions and prejudices of the populace?15 Moreover, is ‘aestheticism’ an unnecessary and superfluous pursuit that has no real substance? Is our notion of beauty misguided? Is this why the plainness of the photograph ‘alarms’? If we see the storyteller, as Ivan Kreilkamp suggests, ‘as a mythologized figure who embodies a lost natural past’,16 then, it is perhaps no wonder that, when confronted with this plain image, the novelist-narrator reacts in this way. The image of the mythologized storyteller, here come alive, becomes at one and the same time threatening and seductive to the novelist, whose loss of voice has been engulfed by print. Aestheticism has replaced a traditional craft of telling stories; the function of the storyteller – to entertain, to instruct, to keep histories, to impart wisdom – has lost its immediacy; all is now poised on the talents of the individual genius. Interestingly, the relationship between the individual and the collective is also reflected in the novel through its focus on the question of identity. Indeed, although the frame narrative begins by setting up the narrator’s quest to disclose the identity of the storyteller in the photograph, nevertheless, the very act of raising this question urges the reader to question the identity of the narrator himself. Indeed, the narrator’s own anonymity, as well as the question surrounding his written text’s narrative focus – is he writing a ‘memoir’ or a ‘novel’? – doubly highlight this. The fact that the narrator’s narrative is concerned with his search to find the elusive figure of Saúl-storyteller leads the reader to question who is doing the telling: why is the narrator (similarly) shrouded in mystery? Who will reveal his story and explain, for example, why he so desperately wants to discover the truth about Saúl and his suspected conversion into the Machiguenga storyteller? Indeed, the ambiguity and lack of information in the figure of the narrator in many ways reflects the mystery shrouding the person whose story he is seeking to reveal. However, all we can glean about him is from his intention to write, and as such, he moves from an anonymous scholar, to a memoirist and then into the position of novelist (or writer of the text). These positions are not directly stated but rather inferred from the text and the narratives that ensue. Moreover, the position of novelist is only assumed if we see both ‘narrative situations’ – the narrator’s memories of Saúl and the storyteller’s narratives – as part of the narrator’s repertoire. Indeed, this suspicion is given more credence by the ambiguity surrounding the source of the storyteller’s narratives. The stories he tells to the Machiguenga tribe are peppered with snippets of tribal gossip, tribal legend and lore, but also include tales from his own travels. But as these narratives sit outside the narrator’s memoirs – he was not present when the storyteller narrated these to the tribes – the authenticity of storyteller’s stories are thus thrown into question,

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and as such, the ‘memoir’ becomes framed under ‘imaginative fiction’ or novel, and the narrator, thus steps into the shoes of a novelist. Framing the text as a fiction necessarily places the narrator in the role of novelist, but also of storyteller. The novel’s deliberate ambiguity regarding the identity of the narrator is further compounded by certain narrative clues which lead us to question and perhaps identify him with the person of the author, the ‘real’, non-fictional novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, as certain critics have already argued.17 For example, the novel ends with two dates: ‘Firenze, 1985 and London, 1987’ (S 246), which suggests that it was written at two different times and possibly by two different persons. Lucille Kerr advocates that the first of these dates ‘corresponds to the narrator’s situation’18 within the fictional frame of the novel but that the second points to a date that indicates Vargas Llosa’s writing of the novel. Moreover, the acknowledgement found at the end of the novel, which is also signed by Vargas Llosa, reiterates this fact. Here, Vargas Llosa clearly acknowledges the people and places he has visited whilst conducting in his research on the novel and which correspond(s) to the narrator’s own reflections. Nevertheless, whether this is meant to be Vargas Llosa or not is only one aspect of what Kerr sees as ‘a confusion or confounding of authorial figures and faces’19 with which this novel is concerned. Indeed, as I mentioned above, one of the recurring themes with which the novel is concerned relates to the notions of transformation and metamorphosis, concepts which are played out in the masking and unmasking of these authorial figures. Kerr’s reading tackles this question of authorship, which she concludes, contradictorily, as being one which ‘is about a turn away from and also a return to the figure of the author’.20 In the interview with Ricardo A. Setti (1986), Vargas Llosa explicitly argues this very point. He states that the narrator of a story is never the author, even when he appears with the same name, surname and the self-same life as the author. Rather, the narrator is the first character that the author creates.21 Following the storyteller who combines his own and others’ experience to create his fiction, Vargas Llosa insists that the narrator is always an invention, and is always someone into whom the author transforms and translates himself. In this way, Vargas Llosa highlights not only the distance from the actual author but, more importantly, asserts his fictionality. This insistence by the author on the fictionality of the narrator highlights the fictionality of all the subsequent authorial figures in the novel and notably, those that converge in the unmasking of the storyteller. As the storyteller is one who relinquishes authority for his narrative, his voice becomes, in contrast to Kerr’s reading, separate from that of the author and implicitly then also distant from the resulting synonymy

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of authorship with ‘authority’. In the highlighting of his voice as both the individual and collective expression of a community, the author thus vows his allegiance to the storyteller. From this perspective, it is more apt to see the author as ultimately absent from the text, a fact that corresponds more to the idea of authorial death than to his resurrection.

Storytelling and exile: Dante As in Crace’s The Gift of Stones, Vargas Llosa’s storyteller is born from marginalization and exile. Here too, we see how exile leads to transformation and metamorphosis which in turn leads to ‘storytellerhood’.22 In The Storyteller, however, these transformations are more self-consciously assumed. Although in Crace’s novel the storyteller’s subsequent exile from his community is the result of a wound, in Vargas Llosa this exile, both on the part of the narrator and the storyteller Saúl, is chosen. Here, the return to the storyteller presents itself not as a birth but a rebirth. It is from this perspective that the turn to ‘storytellerhood’ becomes a religious and almost mystical experience. The storyteller does not ‘birth’ storytelling, but rediscovers it – the opening image of Florence and the Renaissance hints at this. Aware of both oral and the literary traditions, he has earned the right to choose a ‘storytelling renaissance’ and thus his allusions to other texts, figures, authors and faces, all serve to facilitate his choice. Primarily, the move from South America to Europe, the evocation of the birth of European literature and art, serves to link the narrator-novelist to the European Western tradition of Literature and all it represents. Furthermore, the abandonment of the narrator’s reading and solitary study also reflects the abandonment, or at least a questioning, of these very values, a problem which he plays out throughout the novel in both his own and the storyteller’s, Saúl’s, narratives. Instead of looking at Renaissance architecture, he looks at a photograph. Instead of studying form and interpretation, he is led by memories and by fictions. Thus, as much as the narrator seems to embrace and exalt the European literary tradition, which birthed the novel, the very medium in which his own narrative is arguably contained, he is also drawn to something he sees in the tribal storyteller whose communal and embodied act of storytelling proves integral to the community’s very existence and survival. Those habaldores [. . .] using the simplest, most time-hallowed of expedients, the telling of stories, were the living sap that circulated and made the Machiguengas into a society, a people of interconnected and interdependent beings. (S 93)

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With the European tradition comes the notion of the artist as a solitary individual who, in order to create his masterpiece, needs to abandon the world and the community in order to emerge with his genius or inspiration. This is compounded by the myth of figures such as Philoctetes, that I highlighted in the previous chapter, of the artist as outcast, whose suffering and exile thus leads him to ‘genius’ or ‘inspiration’. On the other hand, the abandonment of this scholarly pursuit, specifically related to us in the opening pages, calls into question the romanticism which surrounds such a conception of the artist. But, a different kind of romanticism is equally at work in the Western glamorization of the primitive storyteller, particularly one that is placed within a tribal setting. In this way, the romanticism of isolated and suffering genius that surrounds the artist coming out of the European tradition, is juxtaposed and subsequently problematized by an equally questionable romanticism, one that instead surrounds the tribal, premodern, primitive storyteller whose image the novelist-narrator is confronted with. One is a romanticization of the lone scholar or alienated genius, the other of the communality of ‘voice’ of tribe and teller: individual genius or originality moves more towards a notion of collective wisdom (received wisdom). As we saw with Benjamin, this premodern, primitive storyteller similarly harked back to a romanticized past, a past that the narrator in some ways reflects in his own fascination and subsequent telling of the storyteller’s story. Keith Booker sees this instead as a reflection of the difficulties that the novelist faces in the light of a rising postmodernity. He notes, If Dante and Machiavelli are figures of an ideal literary past, then the habladores are even more so, playing the kind of essential and effective role in Machiguenga culture that the novelist himself no longer feels able to play amid the confusion of the modern world.23

However, this reading is perhaps too simplistic and romanticized. Vargas Llosa’s intricately crafted novel does not give the impression that he is ineffective, nor that he is confused. Instead, we could see the novel as an assertion of the function that the novelist as the ancestor of the storyteller plays within society, and in this way the storyteller’s image is more of an assertion of the importance of this figure still today. With the picture of the tribal storyteller fresh in both the narrator’s and the reader’s mind, this return to these famous Florentines becomes ever more poignant and provides us with a clue to the narrator’s literary predecessors, those he chooses to follow as part of his tradition. As a result, his evocation of Dante leads us to a few conclusions. First, the narrator’s allusion to Dante as a literary

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predecessor is significant in that he is a poet who wrote in his own dialect (an early Italian) as opposed to Latin; this use of the vernacular links to the bardic tradition (which indeed Dante was interested in), identified as one which the storyteller harks back to.24 In fact, not only did Dante’s interest bring him to discover the Provençal minstrels and poets, but of course it also links him back to Virgil, a poet who he revered so much that he installs him in his Purgatorio as his guide through Hell. Dante’s reference to Virgil as a ‘father’, positions him as an ancestor, and places Dante in the same tradition.25 Secondly, Dante himself was ‘exiled’ from Florence, an exile which he saw as a form of ‘death’ that stripped him of his identity. Although with the narrator of The Storyteller, his is a selfimposed exile, this initial reference to Dante is not to be overlooked. Indeed, it was this exile which arguably granted Dante the distance from which he wrote The Divine Comedy (c.1308–21), an exile which led to poetry. In her study of exile in Literature, María-Inés Lagos-Pope says, ‘there is no doubt that in The Divine Comedy the writing of poetry is linked to the experience of exile’.26 This is most poignantly expressed in the following verse from the third canto of Dante’s Paradiso: Thou shalt abandon each and every thing Most dear to thee: that shaft’s the first that e’er The bow of exile loses from its string.27

Strangely, as with Philoctetes and Crace, the metaphor Dante uses for exile is a bow and arrow: these were what led to his being cast out from his Florentine ‘Eden’. Exile causes suffering and leads to lament, which in turn leads to the image of the wounded storyteller who has to tell his tales in order to survive. Implicitly, from this exile we see the stages of metamorphosis, from one being and person to another. We return to this image of the artist-poet or storyteller, whose suffering and subsequent exile led not only to poetry but to a form of wisdom, perhaps even a spiritual wisdom. Interestingly, Lagos-Pope links exile to prophecy, observing that [. . .] like the prophets, Dante makes of exile a virtue and a necessary perspective from which to speak to the world and from where he can challenge its expectations and assumptions; like the prophets, he also acknowledges that the truth he communicates is, paradoxically, what further alienates him from the world he has already lost.28

However, Dante’s prophecy does not come from true theology but from poetry. Hence, he has been called a theologus nullius dogmatis expers (theologian

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expert in no dogma).29 This is yet another place where Dante and Vargas Llosa’s creations converge. As I argue later in more detail, Saúl’s subsequent conversion to storyteller has ‘spiritual’ connotations (reflected in his name Saúl-Paul). This may be why Vargas Llosa has described Saúl, in his transformation into a storyteller, as a ‘cultural convert’.30 The word ‘cultural’ however, might be misleading: although he definitely embraces a ‘new’ culture, the Machiguengas, the religion he practices is a very old one: storytelling. Saúl’s cultural conversion can be construed, therefore, more so as a conversion to the culture of storytelling than to the Machiguengas themselves.

Storytelling, metamorphosis and monstrosity: The Frankenstein syndrome In The Storyteller, the theme of metamorphosis is linked not only to exile, but also to monstrosity. Significantly, the first image that the narrator and the reader are presented with of the storyteller-to-be is a graphic image of disfigurement. ‘Saúl Zuratas had a birthmark, the color of wine dregs, that covered the entire right side of his face, and unruly red hair as stiff as the bristles of a scrub brush. The birthmark spared neither his ears nor his lips nor his nose, also puffy and misshapen from swollen veins.’ (S 8). From the very first moment we are introduced to Saúl, or Mascarita, we are introduced to this image of a very literal mask: a birthmark that covers half his face. Mirroring Crace’s novel, The Gift of Stones, which begins with the description of the storyteller’s amputated arm, the first chapter of Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller (that follows the frame narrative) similarly presents us with the figure of the outcast, one who, in turn, becomes a storyteller opens with a very similar image. Although in this case the storyteller is not a ‘wounded’ man (as with Philoctetes and the amputee storyteller in Crace’s novel), we are once again shown how this man has been marginalized, from both his community and society as a whole, due to a deformity. Saúl has been marked by difference from birth, literally by a mark on his body. In The Storyteller, however, this disfigurement is significantly placed on his face, which leads to his nickname Mascarita (literally ‘little mask’) and reflects the masks of the storyteller and the question of identity. The opening image of the birthmark is not the only instance where Saúl’s disfigurement is alluded to. In fact, the novelist-narrator makes a point of revealing to us at various instances throughout the narrative just how unsightly this birthmark was, in order to reinforce Saúl’s position as outcast or outsider.31

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The second time we hear reference to Saúl’s disfigurement is when, on entering a billiard parlour, he is referred to by a man as a ‘monster’ who had escaped from a ‘zoo’ (S 14). On seeing Saúl the man shouts at him: ‘You’re not coming in here monster. [. . .] With a face like that, you should keep off the streets. You scare people’ (S 14). Immediately, on hearing this, and having witnessed the event, the narrator is so outraged that he picks a fight with the name-caller, who by this time had begun to make ‘hex signs with his fingers’ (S 14); again, the implication being that Saúl is more like a ‘devil’ than an ‘angel’. However, the narrator makes a point of describing how in contrast to his appearance, as if to prove his kind and gentle nature, Saúl takes this abuse heroically and simply leaves with a joke and a smile. Finally, on another occasion, while eating in a restaurant, which is incidentally the last occasion our novelist-narrator sees Saúl, his deformity invokes more ogling from a waitress. Not only does she stand ‘for a long moment looking, fascinated, at Saúl’s birthmark’, but as she walks off, the narrator notes how he sees ‘her cross herself as she went back to her stove’ (S 98). In the narrator’s descriptions of the reactions to Saul’s disfigurement, we not only see how Saúl is cast out of his community, but also how this is linked to monstrosity. The reactions to Saúl’s disfigurement are clearly quite extreme. Mascarita, the masked man, cannot be heard because he is seen as different. His story is already decided on by others: he is a devil. The symbols of the cross and the hex signs serve to reinforce the way that even the sight of him is contaminating and fearful to those who see him; in other words, what he represents, the condition of otherness, is threatening to his community and he must be cast out, like a demon. Saúl is not only demonized but dehumanized and, as a direct consequence of his appearance, he is, tellingly, not given the opportunity to speak. However, as we learnt from the example of Crace’s storyteller, and from the myth of Philoctetes, it is precisely the ensuing ‘suffering’ that the wounded, disfigured or outcast figure suffers that leads him to wisdom: the wisdom of the storyteller. The novel draws parallels between Saúl’s monstrosity and the treatment of monstrosity in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1813), signalled in the narrative by Saúl’s own reference to his disfigurement as a ‘Frankenstein syndrome’ (S 29). This reference to Frankenstein works on a variety of levels but, primarily, this literary allusion serves to reinforce the notion that Saúl is a man of letters, thus situating him in the literary tradition. However, as we shall see, his subsequent abandonment of this myth and its transformation into story, mirrored in Saúl’s ‘conversion’ to oral storyteller, puts the romantic beliefs that it upheld

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into question. For any reader versed in Romantic literature the parallels are unavoidable, beginning with the horrific appearance of the teller of tales. The first parallel that Saúl has with Frankenstein’s monster is that his disfigurement cannot be hidden. Just like Frankenstein’s monster, who has to hide from the world due to his horrific and gruesome appearance, the sight of Saúl evokes similar fears. Significantly, his very presence scares people to the point that they cross themselves as if he is a ‘devil’ (S 212), a term that is equally used to describe Frankenstein’s monster.32 Indeed, for both figures, it is society that turns them away due to its inability to accept difference, represented here by monstrosity. Moreover, it is this subsequent casting out of the safe confines of community and family that forces them to ‘wander’ the earth searching for a home, or at the very least, a place in which they are accepted. For Frankenstein’s monster this search, of course, proves to be futile; he never finds a home and is left wandering the earth in search of a father devoid of a history, identity and family. Conversely, Saúl does find a home, but it is not within his direct family or community, but rather within a community habitually labelled as primitive, that is similarly, vis-à-vis his own, ‘other’. It is in Saúl’s adopted home (not in his ‘own’ community, unlike Crace’s storyteller), where his vocation as storyteller is accepted: in the indigenous tribe of the Machiguengas who, for some, represent ‘monsters’ of another kind, namely ‘savages’. This allusion to Frankenstein’s monster is also relevant in that he returns us to another image of the outcast: that of the fatherless figure that echoes both Satan’s banishment from Heaven and man’s subsequent fall from Paradise. This, in turn, begs the question: is it to Heaven that Saúl is returning in his abandonment of the Western world and his return to the primitive state whose ‘noble savageness’ he reveres? As Frankenstein’s monster himself has been seen as the embodiment of the ‘noble savage’, we could interpret Saúl’s return to the ‘primitive’ as an embracing of difference. By returning to and becoming one with the other he dissolves the myth, transforming it through story into something new: a reinvention. His calling seems to be taken directly from Rousseau’s own mouth, as he who had written his discourse ‘On the Origin of Inequality’ (1754) three-quarters of a century before Frankenstein’s monster met his own literary fate. O man, of whatever country you are, and whatever your opinions may be, behold your history, such as I have thought to read it, not in books written by your fellowcreatures, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies [. . .] Discontented with your present state, for reasons which threaten your unfortunate descendants with still greater discontent, you will perhaps wish it were in your power to go back;

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and this feeling should be a panegyric on your first ancestors, a criticism of your contemporaries, and a terror to the unfortunates who will come after you.33

Vargas Llosa’s transformation of the storyteller/monster into a ‘noble savage’ signals our ‘unbelief ’ in his words, and his abandonment. Thus, we are compelled to look at the storyteller as outcast: this has been his role throughout the ages, and one that Frankenstein’s monster also embodied in his own story of his abandonment and fall. In this sense, a second parallel occurs, in that both the monster’s and Saúl’s casting-out could be interpreted to have led them to tell their story and in so doing to become ‘storytellers’. But are critics, or even the contemporary reader, prepared to let the storyteller back in? In one sense, the distance for the reader from both the storyteller and the authornovelist (as his narrative is embedded within the novelist’s outer frame) parallels that of the blind man in Frankenstein, offering us no choice but simply to listen to the voice and not to judge by appearance. Although we might naturally seek to find the origins of the narrative voice in the text, identifying it perhaps with the voice of the embodied author who hides behind the masks of the storyteller and/ or narrator, the narrative urges us to abandon this quest. Following the example of the blind man in Frankenstein, we are guided instead towards ‘faith’ in a voice that is without ‘observable’ origin: the voice of the universal storyteller. However, the question of the authenticity of voice remains. There is an inherent difficulty in our ability to hear the storyteller’s primordial voice, not only because of constraints of space and time, but also because of the confinement of the word to print. Indeed, it is this difficulty that led Benjamin to declare the storyteller’s ‘death’. Nevertheless, hope is provided once again through the figure of the storyteller, a figure which The Storyteller endows with the power of transformation and metamorphosis. The novel posits the idea that were we to recognize that the oral tradition is one of transformation, repetition, reinvention and reinterpretation, we might begin to see it (or hear it) in the voice of ‘speakers’ (habladores) who are reborn in the world of the novel. Vargas Llosa’s choice of the word hablador, meaning ‘the one who speaks,’ thus takes on its full significance.34 Saúl’s subsequent conversion to the Machiguenga storyteller however, produces a different reaction. In juxtaposition to the Liman Peruvians, the Machiguenga do not prohibit Saul’s speech and his ability to tell stories, but embrace it wholeheartedly. It is this acceptance into their community which lifts the mask under which the storyteller was hiding. For the Machinguengas, it is the story, not the individual that is important and it is here where the wisdom of the storyteller lies. Moreover, the implication is that by prohibiting the storyteller from his primary function of telling stories, we are closing ourselves off to his wisdom and the counsel that

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comes from the creation of new stories. Consequently, it is the capacity to listen (as opposed to seeing) that is stressed in Saúl, the storyteller’s, new community. This urge to listen is apparent in the storyteller’s narratives to the Machiguengas, whose audience is so ‘perfect’ that O’Bryant-Knight calls it ‘an Eden of sorts’.35 Hence, Saúl’s question: ‘Does it matter to you, seeing what I look like? Does it matter to you that I am the way I am? What people do and what they don’t matters. [. . .] Stains on a face don’t. That’s wisdom they say’ (S 209). In contradistinction to the modern society that Saúl has left behind, when he tells stories to the Machiguengas, they do not seem to see his face but simply ‘listen to him’ (S 126). Every time I go visit a family I don’t know yet, I think maybe they’ll be frightened and say: ‘He’s a monster, he’s a devil’, when they see me. There, you are laughing again. All of you laugh like that when I ask you: ‘Do you think I’m devil? Is that what my face means?’ ‘No, no, no, and you’re not a monster. You’re Tasurinchi, the storyteller.’ (S 212)

The stress on listening to Tasurinchi (literally ‘god’ or ‘wise-man’), the storyteller, shifts the emphasis from the person of the storyteller to the function of the storyteller and his role within the culture. In this way, the storyteller becomes ‘faceless’ (a curious echo perhaps of the novelist whose ‘voice’ only reaches us through the medium of print). It is voice therefore that characterizes the storyteller, voice, that for lends Saúl a place from which to offer the wisdom of his (former) suffering and ‘experience.’ As the Machiguengas collectively call: ‘Here comes the storyteller. Let’s go listen to him’ (S 210). Although the written word necessitates a reader, not a listener, this focus on orality and speech serves to create the vision of a talking, embodied and always ‘walking, walking’ (S 179) storyteller in the reader’s mind and thus places the reader amongst the storyteller’s audience and into the role of listener. The instruction to listen, therefore, is strongly asserted.36 ‘If you want to hear, you have to know how to listen. I’ve learned how. [. . .] Listen, listen storyteller’ (S 127). Another factor that unites Saúl and Frankenstein’s monster and asserts their status as storytellers is that they both learn to talk and tell their stories from other stories, from literature. Frankenstein’s monster learns to speak from three key books: Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Plutarch’s Lives (1517), all of which are significant not only to the monster himself but also on a wider level to the readers of the text as they reflect the themes of the novel as a whole. Similarly, Saúl chooses a book (in fact it is a ‘story’) that we are told, ‘he had read countless times and knew virtually by heart’ (S 17) and whose author he ‘revered’ (S 16): Franz

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Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ (1915). In this way, the language of the written narrative tradition, of fiction is transformed into an oral mode. Moreover, the traditional model for literacy is reversed. Literacy preceded orality but then was transformed into a ‘alternative’ form of orality (or a feigned or simulated orality). The notion of metamorphosis is thus reflected in the transformation of different modes of storytelling: oral and written. The novel’s allusion to ‘The Metamorphosis’ highlights Saúl’s own metamorphosis from outcast to storyteller, strangely inverting Kafka’s story from a negative to a positive one. His abandonment of law, religion and his own ethnicity, and his adoption of the role of storyteller to a new tribe gives the outsider in him a ‘home’ and thus disbands the Frankenstein myth. Following the series of transformations – Saúl, Mascarita, Monster, Frankenstein, Machiguenga storyteller – in a final act, mirroring another literary outcast, he transforms into his parrot, which is named after the main character in Kafka’s story, Gregor Samsa. The final story that the storyteller tells is a story of parrots whose ‘chattering’ (S 228) he tries to understand until he realizes that they are his ‘companions’ (S 229). This ‘talking animal’ (S 231) not only becomes his ‘shadow’ (S 231), but also is suggestive of the storytelling tradition that moves from one mouth to another, copying, transforming and repeating itself from storyteller to storyteller.37 In fact, the name ‘talking animal’ echoes the description of man as a ‘storytelling animal’ which in this way highlights the importance of storytelling to man. As Saúl transforms into the storyteller, he loses his name; his nickname Mascarita thus takes on greater significance. No longer Saúl Zuratas, he becomes simply the Machiguenga storyteller; no longer an individual but part of the collective. Thus, his anonymity is indicative of his facelessness, of the importance of his story and his words, as opposed to his authority as a ‘named’ person.38 Again he mirrors Frankenstein’s monster who is also nameless and without a family bond. His embodiment of the collective (being made of various body parts) is transformed into a positive: the Machiguenga storyteller is the one who brings all the various people of the tribe together. This is why when the narrator is searching for the storyteller throughout the ages, he sees him in various figures, nameless perhaps, but obstinately there.39 Our narrator explains, The hablador, or habladores, must be something like that of a courier service of the community. [. . .] Their name defined them. They spoke. Their mouths were the connecting links of this society that the fight for survival had forced to split up and scatter to the four winds. Thanks to the habladores, fathers had news of their sons, brothers of their sisters and thanks to them they were all kept

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informed of the deaths, births and other happenings in the tribe. [. . .] those habladores who [. . .] using the simplest, most time-hallowed of expedients, the telling of stories, were the living sap that circulated and made the Machiguengas into a society. (S 92–3)40

In this sense the storyteller’s role is one of community-creating which also means culture-creating, and tradition-creating.

Storytelling and ethnic marginalization The politics of ethnicity is another key way that the novel leads us to the storyteller. Mascarita may be marked by birthmark, in a literal way, but he is also an outsider due to his ethnicity. He is a Jew who becomes more interested in studying Ethnology than Law, in other words he is interested in people and their rituals and ways on being in the world than the Law of one nation, that implies obedience and punishment. In historical accounts, the Jews have been described as a wandering people who, until the re-creation of Israel, did not have a stable home. This characteristic is also particular to Saúl and is mirrored in the itinerant storyteller that he eventually becomes. From this perspective, his choice of converting to a wandering ‘storyteller’ seems apt. His story is their story and is the story of all marginalized and threatened communities, whose survival rests on the fact that their stories are kept alive. Unlike Crace’s novel, whose narrative does not focus on a judgement of the villagers vis-à-vis the marginalization of the disfigured boy, in The Storyteller the ethics of marginalization is brought into question from the outset. Following the description of his very unsightly facial disfigurement, the narrator adds the remark: ‘He was the ugliest lad in the world; but he was also a likeable and exceptionally good person’ (S 8). This idea of ‘goodness’ is significant in two ways. First, in that it forces us to question not only our personal judgements, but also those of society as a whole apropos the marginalized; and secondly, in that by so doing, it brings to light the notion of morality. In this sense, it approaches Crace’s novel in its focus on ‘lessons’ and returns us to Benjamin’s ‘Storyteller’. In the novel, the narrator extends the metaphor of marginalization from Saúl to the community of the Machiguengas of the Peruvian Amazon (who significantly, exist outside the constructs of the fictional text). Both he and (the Machiguengas) were anomalies in the eyes of other Peruvians. His birthmark aroused in them, in us, the same feelings, deep down, as those

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creatures living somewhere far away, half-naked, eating each other’s lice and speaking incomprehensible dialects. (S 28)

The narrator unites Saúl and the Machiguengas in their ‘otherness’ from the dominant (civilized) society, while asserting that it is the very existence of their difference that is threatening and thus construed as ‘evil’. The question that is returned to is one that found its roots in the Enlightenment period, and that in the literary tradition of the novel found its expression in novels such as in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). In Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe was initially unaware of the existence of the socalled savages, but in his discovery of Man Friday, we are presented with the concept of ‘the noble savage’, a savage that is somehow ‘good’. If Saúl and the Machiguengas represent the noble savage in the novel, then their capacity to ‘talk and tell their stories’ is surely a progression from Defoe’s time when the concepts of civilized and uncivilized were concretized. Perhaps not. Just as Man Friday cannot speak and has to be taught the language of the civilized, so are the Machiguengas threatened with contemporary versions of Crusoe. As Keith Booker asserts, the Protestant missionaries’ of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, [. . .] attempts to civilize the Machiguengas and to bring them the Word of God represent perhaps the greatest threat to the survival of traditional Machiguenga culture.41

This, in turn, begs the question: why does ‘modern’ society not listen to Saúl’s story? Why this return to the primitive? Is Saúl’s predicament simply a representation of the lone, solitary and displaced novelist and an echo of Benjamin’s rhetoric? The narrator indicates as much. Why in the course of all those years, had I been unable to write my story about the storyteller? The answer [. . .] was the difficulty of inventing, [. . .] a literary form that would suggest, with any reasonable degree of credibility, how a primitive man with a magico-religious mentality would go about telling a story. All my attempts led each time to the impasse of a style that struck me as glaringly false, as implausible as the various ways in which philosophers and novelists of the Enlightenment had put words into the mouths of their exotic characters in the eighteenth century, when the theme of the ‘noble savage’ was fashionable in Europe. (S 158–9)

Despite the narrator’s attempts to find the storyteller, there is something inauthentic here, both in terms of potentially polluting one culture with another (the concept of ‘evil’ is raised but also thrown into question) and in terms of

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Saúl’s appropriation of the tribal storyteller – indeed, the narrator admits that trying to understand this creates for him ‘an insuperable difficulty that pains and frustrates’ him (S 243). Indeed, there is a danger that Saúl’s entry into the Machiguenga culture could be seen to mirror that of the Christian missionaries, whose cause it was to convert them to us. Although Saúl is presented as the one that has undergone the conversion, ‘a cultural convert’, the fact that he tampers with their own mythologies, inserting within them ‘western’ fictions, indicates that this conversion may not be absolute.

Cultural conversion Unlike Saúl who transforms and reinvents himself, and who finds his ‘destiny’ in storytelling, the narrator of The Storyteller, as a ‘literate’ and ‘westernised’ individual, is aware that he is still bound by his own constructions of reality and his interpretations. As a result, he does not keep his interpretations to himself, but instead, puts them directly to Saúl, asking him: ‘Had he unconsciously identified with those marginal beings because of his birthmark that made him, too, a marginal being, every time he went out in the streets?’ (S 28). As a humanities student in Lima university, Saúl’s answer also shows that he is aware of Western constructions of reality (here represented by the discourse of ‘pop psychology’) but that he is on the path to rejecting them (a fact that is later further reinforced by his rejection of a scholarship to study in Europe). In reference to a psychology course that they mutually attended, he denies the narrator’s crude psychological interpretation and offers another, proposed by his own father, who had said he was ‘identifying the Amazonian Indians with the Jewish people, always a minority and always persecuted for their religion and their mores that are different from those of the rest of society’ (S 28). This fact leads us away from a Westernized view of reality and the world, and reflects the theme of transformation: it points to other ways of seeing that world that lies outside the European imagination. Perhaps this is why the narrator sees in Saúl’s subsequent transformation into the Machiguenga storyteller something of his own ‘conversion’. As he says himself, ‘Here, I was born a second time’ (S 210). In order to truly see differently, one must abandon all previous beliefs and embrace the new ‘religion’. However, one cannot come to this through reason,

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but only through a spiritual conversion. One must pray to ‘see the light’. Thus the narrator tells us, With hindsight, knowing what happened to him later – I have thought about this a lot – I can say that Saúl experienced a conversion. In a cultural sense and perhaps in a religious one also [. . .] what the priests at the school where I studied tried to convey to us during catechism through phrases such as ‘receiving grace’, ‘being touched by grace’, ‘falling into the snares of grace’. From his first contact with the Amazon jungle, Mascarita was caught in a spiritual trap that made a different person of him. (S 19–20)

As this conversion is a question of belief, it follows that not everyone will see the same way he does. Therefore, it is not about whether we can see the world differently, but what we do with that difference. Tellingly however, Saúl’s conversion to storyteller allows him not to fully abandon all his past identities, as the religion of storytelling allows the blending of traditions and stories from both the tribe and the individual’s experience. Here again, Benjamin’s archetypes for the storyteller, the stay-at-home farmer and the wanderer return in the storyteller-Saúl. But storytelling for Saúl is still a pseudo-religious experience and, perhaps by taking the guise of storyteller, Saúl becomes a kind of prophetic figure in the practice of his craft.42 These prophetic undertones are interspersed throughout the narrative but are particularly apparent in the storyteller’s narrative. As Peter Standish notes, In the hablador sections there are numerous assimilations of Jewish and Christian myths to Machiguenga ones, or vice-versa. I have already alluded to Diaspora. Also we have [. . .] paradise and fall, God and Devil, resurrection, a lost tribe, a promised land, a land of milk and honey, a Messiah, a myth of creation. A chosen people is protected by Tasurinchi-Jehova, a Christ figure is born, and there is a Trinity.43

Apart from allusions in the text, the act of naming once again provides clues. As Mascarita is known for hiding behind ‘masks’, this fact is hardly surprising. Saúl may remind us of the Apostle Paul (originally Saul of Tarsus) who changed his name to Paul after his conversion to Christianity, a fact that various critics have already noted.44 Although some critics have identified the Saul-Paul link of the Christian religion, none have identified or even reflected further or more deeply on the relationship between the connotations of the name Saul with the Jews: a fact that might be significant considering his Jewish heritage. The Jewish Saul

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was the first King of Israel before being reinstated by David and then Solomon. Significantly, Saúl’s father is called Don Salomón, which directly links him to the Jewish King Solomon and thus by implication leads us back to the first Jewish king: King Saul. One of the reasons why King Saul lost his throne to David (who followed him) was because he disobeyed the prophet Samuel, and thus by implication disobeyed God himself. As the prophets were the mediators between God and Man, (they were known as the Judges) and the tellers of God’s law, their will had to be obeyed. One of the key commandments that God gave to the Jewish people was ‘to wipe out the descendants of Amalek’ (Duet. 25: 19), who were the sworn enemies of the Jews and whose religions from the perspective of monotheistic Judaism were founded on idolatry, paganism and barbarism. In this sense, they specifically represented the war against good and evil; moreover, the proposition was that if Amalek was not destroyed, its people would forever seek to destroy the Jews in turn. As a result, it was given to Saul to perpetrate genocide against the Amalekites. However, although Saul did kill the majority of them, he did not kill them all. This effectively resulted in the loss of his throne as leader of the Israelites.45 Saúl, our storyteller-to-be, is a displaced Jew brought up in Peru who later leaves his second home to be part of a third: the ancient Amazonian tribe known as the Machiguengas. Although the last thing our narrator hears of Saúl, following the death of his father Don Salomón, is that he returned to Israel, to his own nation and spiritual home, he later finds out that this was, in fact, not the case: Saúl had abandoned Israel for the Machiguengas. Instead of this return to his ancestral land, to the home of (his father), ‘Solomon’s temple’, Saúl had chosen a new homeland, one that is seen to embrace some of the very traditions that the Amaleks were originally known for: specifically, paganism and idolatry. In this sense, our storyteller-Saúl mirrors King Saul’s disobedience. However, this is further complicated by the fact that he was also duping his father while at university, claiming that he was studying ‘Law’ and not ‘Ethnology’, both subjects that are highly relevant to King Saul’s story. Although he does not renounce his Jewish roots, in that the stories he tells later to the Machiguengas allude to them, he does at least reinterpret his religion, and chooses instead to believe in and tell stories. This is the true sense of ‘cultural conversion’ that Vargas Llosa seems to be foregrounding: it is a conversion to storytelling as an ideology, approaching perhaps religion. Doris Sommer makes a similar point here stating, The Jewish Saul becomes a figure for the Machiguengas for reasons beyond a general affinity between one marginalized group and another. He is more than

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a metaphor for the minority culture condemned to extinction by majoritarian redemption campaigns. For one thing, both nomadic tribes cling to, and are sustained by, ritually repeated narratives that amount to the Law. Diasporic Jews know, in the words of a folk refrain, that ‘Torah is the best Skhorah (merchandise)’, because learning is one thing that cannot be confiscated. And oral – postbiblical – ‘Torah’ is traditionally as important as Scripture itself. For another thing, the Jew as hablador is the kind of metaphor that earns some of its evocative power through a shared history.46

The fact that the storyteller-Saúl was a student of ethnology now becomes relevant. Through the sharing, reinterpreting and reinvention that storytelling allows, the storyteller becomes the prophet of ethnos-creating, a concept that might remind us of Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’47 and curiously, also Salman Rushdie’s ‘imaginary homelands’.48

Storytelling and the politics of ethnos-creation Notably, then, these ideas of metamorphosis do not simply link the idea of individual narrators and their masks, but they also link us to the community, the transformation that is happening on a national and even global level within communities themselves. ‘The transformation of the convert (Saúl) into the storyteller’ (S 243), of the individual, is reflected in the transformation of the community which he represents. If we consider the notion of transformation in terms of the Machiguengas as a tribe under threat, we are forced to question the ethical implications of the change that results from their penetration by the incoming anthropologists, who bring with them their own cultural agenda, and their own idea of what is ethically ‘good’. Naturally, this mixing of cultures could be construed as negative, a kind of pollution as it changes them into something new, a fact that is highlighted by the narrator when he visits the tribe. Initially, however, he describes them in terms of their mythologized image, When we reached the tribes [. . .] there before us was prehistory, the elemental, primeval existence of our distant ancestors: hunters, gatherers, bowmen, nomads, shamans, irrational and animistic. This, too, was Peru, and only then did I become fully aware of it: a small world still untamed, the Stone Age, magico-religious cultures, polygamy, head-shrinking [. . .] that is to say, the dawn of human history. (S 73)

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But he is soon forced to question, Why did he cling to that illusion of his: wanting to preserve these tribes just as they were, their way of life just as it was? To begin with, it wasn’t possible. All of them, some more slowly, others more rapidly, were being contaminated by Western and mestizo influences. (S 73)

This echoes a conversation he described earlier in the novel that took place the last time he had seen Saúl. He tells us that Saúl ‘maintained that we’ve taken up where the colonial missionaries left off. That we, in the name of science, like them in the name of evangelization are the spearhead of the effort to wipe out the Indians’ (S 33). In this sense, the novel raises the questions that not only relate to the place of marginalized cultures within our communities and nations but also in the light of modernity. Is the West, or more broadly Western civilization, and its all-encompassing modernity, with its spearheading of progress and technology, an evil force that contaminates the last remains of primeval man that exist in the world? And does this represent the ‘true’ Fall, the destruction of the myth of Eden, and the Utopian dream? The novelist-narrator tries to offer us answers. At first, he thinks ‘socialism’ is the answer as it ‘would make possible that coexistence between modern and primitive Peru that Mascarita thought impossible and undesirable’ (S 78). However, years later, he realizes that this too was unrealistic: ‘we were as unrealistic and romantic as Mascarita with his archaic, anti-historical utopia’ (S 78). The question remains: how do we move forward when the time of change happens? In Crace’s novel, the community looks to the storyteller for answers; he is to be their guide as they move forward into the future. Indeed, the position in which Vargas Llosa’s novelist-narrator places his storyteller equally follows suit. A closer look at his narratives reveals that it is the blending of various traditions that creates something new. For Booker, the storyteller’s return to culture of the Machiguengas has echoes of Western Romanticism, one that perhaps equally echoes Benjamin’s ‘storyteller’. Booker makes the point that the search for wisdom in the tales of the Machiguengas is in truth little more than an echo of Western Romanticism, in which the vast, brooding presence of the Amazonian jungle provides a source of sublime inspiration as the novelist seeks the beauty of the communion with nature that he believes resides in the culture of the Machiguengas.49

If we follow Booker, then we might see in the storyteller-Saúl a return to the idealized storyteller whose function within the community carried one of

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preserver of memory, history, geneology, wisdom; and, see in the evocation of this figure the novelist as following in this tradition. Indeed, the fact that at one point the novelist-narrator explicitly evokes this transhistorical figure of the storyteller, recognizing him in various other storytellers throughout the ages that we noted in Chapter 1, perhaps points to such a reading. The narrator recognizes him in ‘the wandering troubadours of the Bahia pampas, who, to the basso continuo of their guitars, weave together medieval romances of chivalry and local gossip in the dusty villages of northeastern Brazil’ (S 164). Similarly, he sees him in the figure of ‘the Irish seanchaí’ who is described to him by a local in a Dublin bar as a ‘teller of ancient stories’ and ‘the one who knows things’ (S 164). The vision of the seanchaí leads the novelist-protagonist to see him as ‘a living relic of the ancient bards of Hibernia’, still recounting ‘in our own day, old legends, epic deeds, terrible loves and disturbing miracles, in the smoky warmth of pubs’ (S 165). The storyteller seems to encompass many different people: never stable, his nature is one of constant evasion. He can be a tavern-keeper, a truck driver, a parson, a beggar, someone mysteriously touched by the magic wand of wisdom and the art of reciting, of remembering, of reinventing and enriching tales told and retold down through the centuries; a messenger from the times of myth and magic, older than history, to whom Irishmen of today listen spellbound for hours on end. (S 165)

These images of the transhistorical, transcultural or archetypal storyteller synthesize in the figure of the Machiguenga storyteller. The storyteller in the novel does not substitute the Machiguenga’s stories with others, but rather focuses on blending of both the traditional lore and that of his own narrative tradition, thus creating a synthesis which follows the tenets of the oral tradition, one which see the storyteller at the centre. By raising the question of whether or not it was his difference, marginality and subsequent casting out that led to Saúl’s cultural conversion and identification with the indigenous and marginalized tribe, the narrator not only questions our ability to empathize with the Other, but also in so doing, demands that we question our very construction of the Other and ourselves. The message that The Storyteller seems to send out is that we cannot stop progress and change, we cannot preserve or re-create the ‘noble savage’, but we can perhaps return to the idea of ‘stories’ rather than ‘truths’ and to ‘community’ rather than individuality. The Storyteller reflects these concerns in a fictionalized image that presents us with both a real and mythologized storyteller. Beyond the question of whether Saúl is the storyteller, or whether it is Vargas Llosa, what of

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the real storytellers who are fighting for the survival of their tribes? Reflected in this is the reality of the Machiguenga community, previously untouched, that is now being threatened by the invading arms of modernity. The storyteller, the keeper of the stories of the lost tribe, the first man, is like a hunted animal on the verge of becoming an endangered species. As the Machiguenga storyteller tells us, curiously echoing Benjamin: ‘It’s bad that wisdom should be getting lost’ (S 189). In an interview with Lois Parkinson Zamora in 2003, Vargas Llosa talks about some of the issues that come out of this juxtaposition between local (represented by the storyteller) and national cultures as represented in The Storyteller. Here, Llosa stresses that the survival of that culture is specifically due to the ‘cultural mechanism’50 that the storytellers represent. If the storytellers die then the tribe loses its identity and tradition and finally is overtaken by the larger national culture that seeks to engulf it. Indeed, in the novel, this situation is reflected in the anthropologists, the Schneils, whose aid and role is a necessary reality of modernity. Saúl, of course, provides the other solution, one that one might think more inconceivable in reality: he abandons anthropology and his studies and prefers to return to this culture as their storyteller. As Eric Gorham poignantly observes: ‘The storyteller is more than a judge who decides if and how culture is significant and meaningful. Storytelling constitutes a part of the art of citizenship.’51 From this perspective, Saúl’s ‘return to the fundamentals, to the source’ (S 243) and his ‘Return’ (S 243) to the storyteller, is a means of reminding us of the importance of the original cultural creator in human societies. As Saúl tells us: Talking the way a storyteller talks means being in the very heart of that culture, means having penetrated its essence, reached the marrow of its history and mythology, given body to its taboos, images, ancestral desire, and terrors. It means being, in the most profound way possible, a rooted Machiguenga, one of the ancient lineage who. . .roamed the forests of my country, bringing and bearing away those tales, lies fictions, gossip, and jokes that make a community of that people of scattered beings, keeping alive among them the feeling of oneness, of constituting something fraternal and solid. (S 44)

As the novel suggests then, if this task rests on the storytellers to keep the culture alive, then Saúl’s transformation really ensures a true preservation. Real nations are therefore fictitious nations which, in turn, become real to the people that tell and listen to their stories; they are created by the imaginary landscapes that the storyteller brings alive and are constantly in flux, transforming and metamorphosing like the many masks of the storyteller.

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This novel, in its investigation of the storyteller and the novelist, attempts to ‘universalise’ these positions by linking both the storytellers and novelists of various cultures together. Vargas Llosa has emphasized this fact both in his selfconscious mixing of traditions in this novel and in his choice of intertextual references. This mixing and learning from other traditions is reflected in his own reading which is more ‘global’ than national. As Vargas Llosa tells us, What I read mostly, and probably this was the case of most Latin Americans of my generation, were foreign authors; we read American novelists: Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner; we read French authors: Flaubert, Sartre, Camus: Italian authors: Moravia; English authors; German authors. I think that this has given Latin American literature a perspective that is not at all provincial [. . .]. It is very important not to be secluded in your own tradition if you want to write works that are universal, that is, works in which people from other traditions can recognize their own worlds.52

By bringing all these discourses and traditions together, the novel presents us with a conception of the novel which moves more towards Weltliteratur, a literature which operates not only in a localized but also in a global context. However, crucially, it is the storyteller who emerges as the quintessential and unifying figure, a figure that brings both traditions and their respective tellers together. Through the evocation of the ancestral storyteller, represented by the tribal storyteller of Machiguengas, and the presentation of the mythology that surrounds him, the novel paradoxically succeeds in demythologizing the storyteller and bringing him back into literary history. The literary tradition itself – or more correctly perhaps ‘the tradition of storytelling’ in its purest form – by its very nature, not only moves between, but actually feeds off, the merging or mingling of the local, the national and the global. Vargas Llosa, (like other contemporary writers: for example, Crace, Rushdie) seems to promote the belief in the inherent universality of stories – in their ability to question and bring to light current contentious issues and preoccupations that take us back through our own histories and stories. In this sense, he shows us that storytelling becomes a political act. Stories are not only entertainments: they are powerful. The grand narratives of history, religion, philosophy and especially the discourses of political leaders, the leaders of nations, have demonstrated this. As Davis notes, ‘In the profusion of dialogues, extended ‘conversations’ between authors, texts, characters, mythologies and epochs, Vargas Llosa questions modern assumptions concerning the motives of anthropology, linguistics, cultural imperialism and of history itself.’53 Perhaps, then, the return of the storyteller in this novel, as Davis

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observes, is more a way of raising these issues without claiming responsibility for any one position; and this is precisely the point of the storyteller: what he tells is not just an individual story, the work of an ‘individual genius’, the creator or author of a text, he tells our stories, reflects our own questions and it is here where Vargas Llosa’s novel ultimately seeks to convert.

Notes 1 Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller, trans. Helen Lane (New York: Penguin Books, 1990). All subsequent quotations in this chapter are taken from this translation. All subsequent in-text quotations in this chapter are taken from this edition and will appear in the text in the abbreviated form ‘S’ followed by the page number. This novel is also referred to by its Spanish name, El Hablador, occasionally by critics. 2 Peter Standish, ‘Vargas Llosa’s Parrot’, Hispanic Review 59.2 (1991): 145. 3 I have noted in Chapter 2 and in Chapter 6 on Barth, that we must be wary of using postmodernism as an ‘umbrella’ term to apply to literary fiction. This said, I do not intend to concentrate on a reading of The Storyteller that focuses on postmodernism as a key aspect. 4 Jennifer Geddes uses this word in her reading of the novel. See Jennifer L. Geddes, ‘A Fascination for Stories: The Call to Community and Conversion in Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller’, Literature and Theology 10.4 (1996): 370–7. 5 Lucille Kerr, Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions from Spanish America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 154. 6 As we approach the end of the first chapter, the narrative sets up this identity quest one which the novelist-narrator suspects rests in his old acquaintance Saúl (Chapter 1 ends with the words ‘storyteller’ and Chapter 2 begins with the words ‘Saúl Zuratas’ which points to the link between the two. See Doris Sommer, ‘Aboutface: The Talker Turns’, Boundary 2 23.1 (1996): 106. 7 Jean O’Bryant-Knight, The Story of the Storyteller: La Tía Julia Y El Escribidor, Historia De Mayta, and El Hablador by Mario Vargas Llosa (Amsterdam, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995), 76. 8 O’Bryant-Knight, The Story of the Storyteller, 76. 9 Keith Booker, Vargas Llosa among the Postmodernists (Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 122. 10 Ibid. 11 See Chapter 1 of this book, ‘The (Hi)Story of the Storyteller’. 12 I will be returning to this later in this discussion. 13 Ivan Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 180.

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14 Benjamin, Illuminations, 91. 15 Interestingly, perhaps, Mario Vargas Llosa could be said to embody some of these positions. As Peter Standish notes, Vargas Llosa has stood as a candidate for the Presidency of Peru a few times, in addition to his long-standing reputation as speaker, orator and TV presenter. See Standish, Hispanic Review, 146. 16 Kreilkamp, 4. 17 Ibid. 18 Kerr, Reclaiming the Author, 135. 19 Ibid., 134. 20 Ibid., 157. 21 Ricardo Setti. Conversas com Vargas Llosa. Sao Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1986. Print. Although this article is in Spanish, and my Spanish is only rudimentary, I confirmed the translation of this part of the interview from a bilingual friend. 22 I am using this word quite consciously to highlight the functions, nature and characteristics which surround the storyteller and that are embodied in him. 23 Booker, Vargas Llosa, 122–3. 24 Count Cesare Balbo and Frances Joanna Lady Bunbury, The Life and Times of Dante Alighieri, trans. F. J. Bunbury. Vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), 63–4. 25 Purgatorio c. 9 v. 50. Qtd. in Balbo and Bunbury. 26 María-Inés Lagos-Pope, Exile in Literature (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1988), 53. 27 Paradiso c. 17 v. 55–7. See Dante Alighieri, The Comedy of Dante Aligheri the Florentine: Canto III: Paradise (Il Paradiso) 1962, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (Harmondsworth, MDX: Penguin Books, 1986), 207. 28 Lagos-Pope, Exile in Literature, 54. 29 Ibid., 53. 30 See Chapter 1 of this thesis, ‘The (Hi)Story of the Storyteller’. 31 This relationship between insider and outsider in The Storyteller has been investigated by Mark Millington. See Mark I. Millington, ‘Insiders and Outsiders: Cultural Encounters in Vargas Llosa’s La Casa Verde and El Hablador.’ Forum for Modern Language Studies 31.2 (1995): 165–76. 32 There are numerous instances in the Shelley’s novel where the monster is referred to as a ‘devil’. See Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. (1st published 1818. London: Collector’s Library), 91, 118, 119, 121. 33 Jean Jacques Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men and Is It Authorized by Natural Law?’ 1754. The Constitution Society. 7 January 2007. www. constitution.org/jjr/ineq.htm. 34 Muñoz, A Storyteller, 80. 35 O’Bryant-Knight, The Story of the Storyteller, 95.

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36 For a more in-depth analysis of the relationship between orality and literacy in the novel, see ibid., 78–84. 37 Standish notes that the parrot is an allusion to the nineteenth-century French writer Gustave Flaubert, who was said to have borrowed a parrot from a local museum so that he might describe it in vivid realistic detail for a short story he was writing. Standish notes, ‘Flaubert, too, used his bird in a similar way at the end of one of his novels, Un coeur simple. His protagonist, appropriately called Felicite, dotes on her parrot, even once dead and stuffed; at the end of the novel she comes to wonder whether this articulate beast, this imitator of human sounds, might not represent the Holy Ghost, and as she dies imagines a huge parrot hovering above her head.’ See Standish, Hispanic Review, 147, 149. Mary Davis also makes the link between Flaubert, Kafka and Vargas Llosa and notes: ‘It should come as no surprise that the novelist who has admired Flaubert as a spiritual father should pay homage to Kafka, who considered himself ‘a spiritual son’ of Flaubert. Vargas Llosa’s use of the ‘The Metamorphosis’ illustrates the self-conscious nature of this text; he assumes that the reader is familiar with Kafka’s text (and his world), and he does not hesitate to parody Samsa’s history as he incorporates it. The final episodes in the speaker’s narrative employ a delirious number of interior narrators, not the least of whom is Gregor Samsa, as an insect, narrating from within an iguana who has, before our very eyes, devoured him.’ See Mary E. Davis, ‘Mario Vargas Llosa and Reality’s Revolution’, in David Bevan (ed.), Literature and Revolution (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), 138. 38 The anonymous narrator of the novel thus also parallels the storyteller-daughter in Crace who, in telling the story of her father’s birth to storyteller-hood, is not only continuing the storytelling tradition herself, but also advocating its need to continue. The storyteller is a functional being, one that expresses the collective and not the individual talent. Although the narrative is further complicated by the idea of a ‘writerly’ narrator, as opposed to the implicit spoken narrative of the storyteller-daughter in Crace, it is the very same narrative tradition, the oral (illiterate) tradition that Vargas Llosa’s narrator foregrounds. In The Storyteller, however, we do not witness the birth of the ‘first’ storyteller, but more so his rebirth. Storytelling, here takes on the aura of a spiritual conversion. 39 See Chapter 1, ‘The (Hi)Story of the Storyteller.’ 40 The word hablador is not without connotations. Peter Standish traces the etymology of hablador which he argues leads to the idea of a ‘fabulator’, one who creates ‘fables’. He says: ‘The Latin verb, from which hablador derives, fabulari (itself derived from fari: to speak) was to tell tales, fabulae; hence it also gives us English “fable”, and that obsolete word resurrected some years ago by Robert Scholes, “fabulator”, which now comes to mean the self-conscious storyteller. [. . .] Fabulari also gave us hablar, hence hablador, the person engaged in the act of speaking; except, perhaps, in the sense of chismoso, in normal modern Spanish

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43 44

45

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usage there is little in the meaning of hablador that is fabulative or fabulatory or fabulous, little, so to speak, to write home about. But these are precisely some of the layers of meaning that Vargas Llosa gives to this normally somewhat dull term.’ See Standish, Hispanic Review, 143. Booker, Vargas Llosa, 127. In the OED, the first meaning of prophet is ‘a person who speaks by divine inspiration or as the interpreter through whom the will of a god is expressed.’ Although in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the Islamic faith the prophet indicates a specific person who is known by name, (e.g. prophet Muhammad, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, etc.) this is not the only application of the word. Indeed, there is more than one meaning to prophecy, which perhaps shows that its meaning is partially dependent on the belief of the individual applying it. In other words, God does not necessarily have to exist for there to be prophecy. The second meaning given is simply ‘a person gifted with profound moral insight and exceptional powers of expression’; the third ‘a predictor; a soothsayer’; and the fourth ‘the chief spokesperson of a movement or cause.’ The etymology of the word is also interesting and returns us to the idea of embodiment and the oral word. As the word prophet etymologically means ‘before speaker’, it is through the oral word that prophecy reaches us, through voice. It is the second, third and last meanings of the link the word ‘prophet’ to Vargas Llosa’s storyteller. Standish, Hispanic Review, 148. Standish makes the point that Zuratas is almost an anagram of Tarsus. He also links Saúl’s parrot to the idea of the dove, which in Spanish is zurita, and notes that Saúl’s story about the parrots beginning to talk to him reflects this spiritual conversion to storyteller. See ibid., 148–9. See 1 Samuel, 8.6–8, 1 Samuel 15.1–35. To this day some Jews believe that the consequences of Saul’s mistake are still apparent, and some even see Hitler as a descendant of Amalek as he espoused the Amalekite ideology, highlighted in the following speech: ‘Yes, we are barbarians! We want to be barbarians. It is an honourable title to us. [. . .] Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I free man from [. . .] the degrading self-mortification of a false vision called conscience and morality. [. . .] Conscience is a Jewish invention.’ However, the point of referring to Saul as a Jew, is not necessarily to enter into debates concerning particular ethnic histories, but instead to highlight the absurdity of the outsider position and of notions of superiority between peoples, a wisdom that the universal storyteller, personified by Saúl, reinforces. See Adolf Hitler and Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939), 87, 220–2. Sommer, Boundary, 115. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Rev. edn; London: Verso, 1991).

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48 ‘Imaginary Homelands’ is the title to both a collection of essays and an individual essay by Rushdie. Rushdie and Vargas Llosa do seem to echo each other on various points and this idea of nation and memory is but one. Rushdie says: ‘It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back [. . .] we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost [. . .] we will in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.’ See Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books in association with Penguin, 1992), 10. 49 Booker, Vargas Llosa, 125–6. 50 Lois Parkinson Zamora, ‘Interview: Mario Vargas Llosa Speaks about Dictator Novels, Globalization, The Novel and Reverse Striptease . . .’ Hotel Amerika 1.2 (Spring 2003): 33. 51 Eric Gorham, ‘Teaching Political Judgment through Literature: Lessons from Hannah Ardent and Mario Vargas Llosa. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 88:3/4 (2005): 283. 52 Zamora, Hotel Amerika, 33. 53 Davis, Literature and Revolution, 141.

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5

The Oral Storyteller: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories

It does not matter whether [. . .] children’s stories are told well or badly or whether they are read. The constitute the first real encounter with the folktale, and it quite often happens that it is decided then and there who will become, sometimes after many decades, a good storyteller. Linda Dégh, Folktales and Society, 104 All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. Isak Dinesen, cited by Hannah Ardent in The Human Condition, 175

Rushdie’s apprenticeship in fiction began at an early age; rooted in oral beginnings, Rushdie’s was a world of storytellers. It was served under a mother who he describes as ‘a gossip of world class’,1 a woman who as ‘the keeper of “family” stories’,2 fostered a similar love of gossip in him, a fact that has led Syed Amanuddin to conclude that: ‘Perhaps the greatest influence of all on him seems to be that of his own ears.’3 But Rushdie’s apprenticeship was also served under a father who, following the practices of traditional storytellers, told him stories gleaned from the great story cycles of his Eastern cultural heritage. In his recent autobiographical memoir Joseph Anton (2012), Rushdie recollects this experience, recalling how his father told them all and retold them and remade them and reinvented them in his own way – the stories of Scheherazade from the Thousand and One Nights, stories told against death to prove the ability of stories to civilize and overcome even

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the most murderous of tyrants; and the animal fables of the Panchatantra; and the marvels that poured like a waterfall from the Kathasaritsagara, the ‘Ocean of the Streams of Story’, the immense story lake in Kashmir where his ancestors had been born; and the tales of mighty heroes collected in the Hamzanama and the Adventures of Hatim Tai.4

In the stories his father told, we see echoes of the many timeless storytellers of his native India, telling stories at social gatherings, by the fire at night or in the many marketplaces of towns and villages across the land.5 Like the storytellers of old, Rushdie inherits the tradition of storytelling from his family environment: like his parents before him he has literally lived in a world of storytellers who have told and retold stories that can directly be traced back to this ancient cultural tradition. Steeped in hundreds of years of oral tradition, collections of tales such as the Arabic Arabian Nights, the Sanskrit Kathasaritsagara, the Persian Conference of Birds, have been circulating in a thriving oral tradition that has dominated middle, central and southeastern Asia from medieval times to the present day. For any reader who is familiar with Rushdie’s novels – and in particular his early novels written between 1980 and 1990: Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses (1988) and Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)6 – it would be difficult to fail to see the influence of these great storytelling collections in them. In fact, the frequency with which both direct and indirect references to these collections occur and reoccur in his fiction has urged numerous critics to comment on their significance; however, no critic has really traced this influence directly to the figure of the storyteller. In the above description of Rushdie’s childhood, we can clearly see that his cultural and family heritage, the heritage of storytellers plays a large part in this influence, one which, as I will be illustrating in this chapter, intricately informs Rushdie’s fiction. Moreover, as storytelling by its very nature is a tradition of retelling and these collections of tales in particular attest to hundreds of years of story(re)telling, the very act of retelling, reworking or remembering them in his fiction places Rushdie within the same tradition: that of the (oral) storyteller.7 As I have argued in Chapter 2, the engagement and/or preoccupation with the storyteller in contemporary fiction is less so the attempt to reproduce or replicate the oral storyteller or his art, but rather a way of recognizing that the oral word carried through the oral storytelling tradition, still informs literature. For Rushdie, this engagement with storytelling is intricately interwoven into the fabric of his novels; it appears at the level of text, thematically, symbolically and metaphorically, inter- intra- and extra-textually. In this chapter, the

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importance and influence of the oral storytelling tradition will serve as the entry point into the exploration of the storyteller in Rushdie’s fiction, one which, in turn, serves to further my larger argument for the return of the storyteller in contemporary fiction.8 Indeed, the relationship between the oral storyteller and the novelist, between oral storytelling and written literary practices, is one that has surfaced in all the texts looked at thus far in this book in relation to the storyteller. However, in Rushdie’s fiction this relationship presents itself as decidedly more ‘dynamic’, and ‘vibrant’, a consequence perhaps of the fact that his novels are not simply influenced by, but are (often) modelled on, oral narratives.9 Reading Rushdie, we are poised to witness the synthesis of writerly novelist and oral storyteller, a synthesis which leads us to a conception of the writer as storyteller as per Benjamin’s Leskov. Rushdie’s novels reveal an intricate engagement with storytelling and the storyteller where writing and telling stories emerges as a symbiotic, if not complimentary practice. Indeed, more than any other writer in this book, Rushdie’s texts seem to blur the line between oral and written storytelling traditions, in other words, between telling stories and writing novels. However, unlike Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller, a novel which blurs the distinctions between writers and storytellers through a problematization of authorial figures and through a ‘simulated’ or ‘imagined’ return to the storytelling practices of an ‘archaic’ storyteller of an indigenous tribe, Rushide’s texts draw on contemporary oral storytelling practices drawn from his native India. Indeed, if we consider that Rushdie grew up within an oral storytelling tradition, this characteristic of his fiction is unsurprising, if not inevitable. For Rushdie, the art of the storyteller is not an archaic but a living traditional practice; the storyteller is by no means ‘something remote from [him] and something that is getting ever-more distant’,10 but, as his fiction illustrates, is very much alive. Consequently, the evocation of storytelling in his novels has the immediacy and potency of Benjaminian ‘experience’, one which finds its roots in a thriving ‘milieu’ of storytellers. Significantly, the problem of how to merge the two modes of storytelling, written and oral, mirror the problem of merging cultural traditions which are pertinently reflected in these very practices. Rushdie’s position between East and West lends an interesting perspective onto his engagement with the storyteller particularly if we see his novels as a cultural product and his role as storyteller– novelist as a cultural producer. Whereas in Victorian fiction (as Kreilkamp argues)11 the storyteller-alias-novelist is posited as a cultural producer, the authentic speaker of a particular group or nation, in Rushdie’s texts the very

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notion of ‘nation’ is destabilized. The storyteller cannot fully represent the voice of the community of people in which he lives, not only because of his realization that the constructs of community, nation and home are ephemeral, but also because he himself is in a position which lies in-between these constructs. Like Defoe’s Satan,12 Rushdie as storyteller is a ‘migrant’, a wanderer, who does not reside in one place or condition, but is permanently and infinitely engaged in telling stories. In this sense, Rushdie’s fiction is crucially concerned with the question of identity, one that we saw surface in the previous chapter in Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller. In Vargas Llosa’s novel the crisis of identity, a condition of othering, is presented through the deformity of the storyteller’s physical self – his body – and it is this which leads to a condition of exile and a search for a new ‘home’. The resolution to both the crisis and the condition of other comes from Saúl’s cultural conversion and rebirth into the Machiguenga storyteller, a tribe and vocation in which he finds acceptance. However, in Rushdie’s fiction this identity crisis is not so easily resolved. Rushdie’s protagonists often reside in a condition of ‘otherness’, an otherness that comes as a consequence of a conflict not within themselves, but one which derives from the difficulty in negotiating their identity in a world where both national and cultural boundaries are constantly shifting. This condition of otherness can be understood on one level as a necessary reflection of their hybrid, post-colonial identities, but on another, emerges as a feature of the very condition of being human.13 Nevertheless, despite this position of ‘inbetween’ once again, it is the figure of the storyteller that provides them with the means of negotiating this identity crisis. As I will be exploring in this chapter, the figure of the storyteller appears as the first person narrator in Midnight’s Children, is symbolized by the figure of Satan and echoed in the main characters of The Satanic Verses, and is both character and narrator in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. In each case the, novels all reflect a problem of identity, which presents itself as a questioning of authenticity, as unreliability, as a questioning of the relationship between facts or truths and fictions. As Keith Booker notes, if the very idea of a stable unified self is revealed by Rushdie to be a fiction, then the Romantic notion of the self as a basis of the authority or sources of truth must be a fiction as well. This attack on the authority of the individual in Rushdie is particularly centered in the persons of his narrators, who are extremely unreliable, being not only inconsistent and contradictory, but oftentimes downright mendacious.14

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The storyteller is the figure that shapes and drives the narrative voice of these novels, a voice which not only highlights the ‘telling of stories’, but employs also storytelling and story as a means of contesting other discourses which present themselves as bearing ‘truth(s)’. In each example, Rushdie’s texts juxtapose the grand narratives of science, history, divine history (revelation) and religion against little narratives or stories, which emerge triumphantly as a space that can encompass all. Where Rushdie’s narratives provide a communal vision, therefore, is through an insistence on the telling of stories as a means of bringing these worlds together. Being irrevocably changed by the experience of ‘otherness’, Rushdie’s storytellers tell stories as a means of understanding themselves and their relation to their ‘lost’ communities in order to establish new, ‘imaginary homelands’,15 homelands of the mind. It is here where Rushdie’s fiction emerges as world fiction and here where it moves towards building bridges rather than solidifying the worlds that lie between them. For Rushdie, therefore, storytelling is intricately linked to being human and emerges as the most important of all human discourses, a lesson he learnt from his childhood apprenticeship in storytelling. As the following account most poignantly reveals, Rushdie says: To grow up steeped in these tellings was to learn two unforgettable lessons: first, that stories were not true (there were no ‘real’ genies in bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lamps), but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that the truth could not tell him; and second that they all belonged to him, just as they belonged to his father, Anis, and to everyone else, they were all his, as they were his father’s, bright stories and dark stories, sacred stories and profane, his to alter and renew and discard and pick up again as and when he pleased, his to laugh at and rejoice in and live in and with and by, to give the stories life by loving them and to be given life by them in return. Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.16

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Rushdie drew on these beliefs and this experience in the writing of his children’s novel, Haroun. As I explore in my reading of the novel, Haroun is more than just simply a call for the freedom of speech (and a response to ‘The Rushdie Affair’). Precisely because it was written during the years when Rushdie was in hiding, and precisely because it was written specifically at the request of his son, and was for his son, it presents

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itself as a personal narrative and, as such, serves as a testament to the power of storytelling for healing. Moreover, the fact that Rushdie chooses the relationship of a parent storyteller to a listening and attentive child to convey his message, lends credence to the importance of storytelling as a means of understanding the world, as well as a means for teaching children the importance of the imagination in relation to human freedom. Indeed, it is this reading of Rushdie’s fiction which links intricately to the figure of the storyteller and equally this which leads Joel Kuortti to conclude that Rushdie’s fiction presents storytelling as ‘an epistemology and an ethics’.17 Evidently then, Rushdie’s writing both breaches the gap between ‘postcolonial’ and/or indigenous or minority literature and ‘western’ literary traditions and opens up key themes that have preoccupied contemporary writers since: hybridity, authority, replenishment and sources of literature and the democracy of storyteller.

Midnight’s Children: The storyteller and his listener Midnight’s Children is a novel that has received a vast amount of critical acclaim. Winning not only the Booker Prize in 1983 – as well as a host of other prizes near the time of its publication – it was also the first novel to win the prestigious Booker of Bookers, a prize which was awarded to the best winning novel in the Booker’s 25-year history. Indeed, the amount of critical attention this novel has received matches its reputation, a fact that is perhaps due to its ambitious nature, its richness and scope, its sheer exhaustiveness in more than just its subject matter. As Norbert Schürer describes in his Midnight’s Children: A Reader’s Guide (2004), ‘the book is encyclopedic and overwhelming. Rushdie’s novel covers more than 60 years in the history of three countries on the Indian subcontinent’ where his employment of a variety of intertextual links from ‘Hindu mythology’ to ‘major works of literature in the Western tradition’ are set against a narrative structure where ‘major plot revelations are deferred almost indefinitely’ and where ‘fantastical elements’ are the norm.18 Moreover, as Schürer goes on to note, These features somehow come together to develop the issues of the novel, which include a confrontation of East and West, an interrogation of the concept of nation, an assessment of the first thirty years of Indian history, a questioning of notions of gender, an examination of the idea of personal

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identity, a challenge to the literary form of the novel, an argument with traditional versions of history and historiography, and an analysis of the certain models of culture.19

Schürer’s summary provides a useful snapshot into this novel’s key issues and preoccupations, areas which critics have explored more deeply in their readings. Indeed, perhaps as a result of its scope, expansiveness and variety of issues, Midnight’s Children has (arguably) achieved a ‘canonical’ status, much akin to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classics. This is interesting to consider given, Rushdie’s anti-canonical stance, and given the influence of the oral tradition in his fiction. First, at the risk of this sounding a little trite, it is important to acknowledge that as a result of the large amount of critical readings the novel has received, when discussing Midnight’s Children, it is difficult not to cover familiar ground. My reading here is not meant to be exhaustive, rather my aim is to highlight an aspect of the novel that serves to establish how the influence of storytelling and the storyteller is (as evident from this early and influential novel) a major aspect of Rushdie’s fiction; this understanding will, in turn, lend insight into my reading of Haroun in the following sections. In Midnight’s Children although the relationship to oral storytelling practices and the (oral) storyteller has been noted by various critics, this avenue has not been fully explored in its own right; instead, it emerges within discussions of the novel as, at best, a complement to a particular reading of the novel, as a factual ‘aside’, or, at worst, it is simply not mentioned. Surprisingly perhaps, despite the profusion of critical essays that the novel has spawned, Kelly Hewson is one of the few critics to have specifically noted the relationship that the novel’s narrator, Saleem Sinai, has to the storyteller and more widely to oral narrative modes.20 Hewson states: One of the things Rushdie has done through the creation of Saleem is to re-install the figure of the storyteller in his novel. He revives an old form of storytelling, one that emphasizes the communal nature of the artistic process and that instills in the story-teller the responsibility of remembering the past, with all the imperfections it entails. The story-teller remembers not so much for the purposes of assimilation but for the purposes of preservation. The story-teller’s function, as Saleem understands it, is to preserve memory against disintegration [. . .] And one of the techniques that give Midnight’s Children its unique shape is the modeling on the oral narrative.21

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In the novel, the preservation of memories is expressed through the metaphor of pickling jars; it is divided into 30 chapters, each of which represent one of these jars of chutney which are full of an amalgamation of mixed ingredients – stories and histories. As Syed Amanuddin has observed, ‘Midnight’s Children is about the art of storytelling itself with emphasis on the picklin’ process of history and on the narrator’s memory.’22 As oral storytelling traditionally served the purpose of preserving memory, this metaphor is apt not only because it expresses the variety of elements that go into the process of (hi)story-telling and (hi)story creating, but also because it intricately reflects the relationship between the written tradition (history and literary fiction: the preservation jars) and the oral storytelling tradition (stories and memories: the ingredients that make up the chutney) or the writer and the storyteller personified in the character of Saleem. Indeed, this ‘chutnification of history’ by Saleem is also experienced by the reader of the novel, who, in reading each chapter, is presented with an ‘ocean’ of stories from personal histories and anecdotes to larger historical and political events. In the novel the history of India is at one and the same time a personal history, a family history which links Saleem to his country, but also a national history within which Saleem’s story both belongs and interacts with. As a result, from the beginning of the novel, the juxtaposition of history and story, oral and written narratives, the voice of the individual (personal) and the collective are all brought into play. It begins in the mode of an autobiographical account, an account of the narrator’s birth: ‘I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time’ (MC 9). However, the way in which the narrator chooses to tell his story betrays from the outset the difficulty he has in negotiating his role as both a writer of a ‘history’ and oral storyteller who is simply telling ‘stories’. As a result, his narration takes the form of an argument between himself, on the nature of how to tell his story. He continues: ‘No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. Not, it’s important to be more . . . On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s independence, I tumbled forth into the world.’ (MC 9)

Saleem’s narrative betrays an unreliability which stems from the difficulty in conjoining the above dualities. The negotiation of his role as an oral storyteller or a written chronicler of the history of his country is illustrated

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by his self-conscious questioning of how he should begin. Should he choose the indefinite, traditional opening formulas of oral folktales and myth – ‘once upon a time’ – or is it better to be precise, to ‘spell it out’ exactly and place his narrative firmly in historical time and a specific place: ‘August 15th 1947’ and ‘Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home’? Cleverly, of course, Saleem’s very questioning means that he chooses neither one nor the other and instead incorporates them both; in so doing, he illustrates not only the intricate relationship between history and story but also and more significantly, raises the question of how we understand these discourses, and the importance we place on them. In other words, which carries more weight? Which is most reliable? Which tells the most truth? The difficulty Saleem has in mediating the personal narrative of his life, the I of his narrative, is also highlighted by the fact that he tells us that his personal history and that of his nation had been glued together ‘mysteriously’, implying a loss of control and uncertainty: ‘I had been mysteriously hand-cuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to that of my nation’ (MC 9). However, ironically perhaps, the only reliable aspect of Saleem’s narrative is the fact that he seems to be reliably describing the process of telling stories. Through the narrative voice of Saleem Rushdie is able to represent not only the difficulty which comes from trying to merge the personal and the collective, but also the difficulty in trying to simultaneously employ two different narrative modes: oral storytelling and written ‘factual’ transcription, such as that of a chronicler or historian. Moreover, the very fact that this is reflected throughout the novel, lends the novel a self-consciousness which, in the context of contemporary theorizations of the novel, lead it to be construed as ‘postmodern’. This is an irony in many ways, since, as Rushdie explains, he is simply employing narrative methods that stem from traditional storytelling practices: One of the strange things about the oral narrative – which I did look at closely before writing Midnight’s Children – is that you find a form which is thousands of years old, and yet which has all the methods of the post-modernist novel, because you have somebody who tells you a story at length, a story which is told from the morning to the night, it probably contains roughly as many words as the novel, and during the course of that story it is absolutely acceptable that the narrator will every so often enter his own story and chat about it – that he’ll comment on the tale, digress because the tale reminds him of something, and then come back to the point. [. . .] It seems that when you look at oral narrative and use it, as I tried to do, as the basis of a novel, you become a post-modernist writer by being a very traditional one.23

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Postmodernism, therefore, for Rushdie, is neither here nor there, and unlike John Barth (who I will be focusing on in the following chapter), importantly, this conscious integration of storytelling practices is not driven by a need to change the novel form, but instead by Rushdie’s own cultural heritage and experience. In this sense, the character of Saleem as both storyteller and ‘writer’ reflects Rushdie’s own attempt to merge these two diverse narrative traditions. It is precisely this modelling on oral storytelling practices which drives the narrative voice of Saleem and which informs the structure and thematic concerns of the novel. This return to telling multiple stories, rather than the telling of one ‘larger’ story, is reflected in various ways throughout the novel. For example, there are numerous instances in the novel where stories begin with the classic ‘once-upon-a-time’ line (MC 9, 216, 280, 320, 326), the opening formula for fairy and folk stories. Other examples include stories which begin in medias res, exemplified in the text by the use of three dots ‘. . .’ as if the reader–listener was simply walking into a room where a storyteller had already begun a story and, therefore, can only but guess the beginning. Other stories fail to reach their conclusion but are similarly cut off in order to make room for yet more stories to begin. There are stories which not only employ fairy-tale formulas but also draw on fairy-tale images and characters such as the story of the Nawab, which begins: ‘once upon a time, in the far northern princedom of Kif, there lived a prince who had three beautiful daughters . . .’ (MC 320) and ends with ‘And we all lived happily ever after. . .’ (MC 326). The effect of all these examples is to consistently assert the telling of stories and to reflect the multitude of stories which populate both Saleem and therefore, also India. Indeed, the amount of stories that Saleem can hear and experience leads him to describe himself at one point as ‘a sort of radio’ (MC 166). In short, the over-population of stories overwhelm Saleem so much that it is no wonder he describes himself as unreliable, no wonder that he expresses the fact that he begins to ‘crack’. He says: I am rushing ahead in breakneck speed; errors are possible, and overstatements, and jarring alterations in tone; I’m racing the cracks, but I remain conscious that errors have already been made, and that, as my decay accelerates (my writing speed is having trouble keeping up), the risk of unreliability grows [. . .] in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important that what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe . . . (MC 270–1)

However, as the above quote reveals, unreliability, fiction, stories within stories are in fact closer to the ‘truth’ of India, the ‘truth’ of his narrative. As Saleem

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tells us: ‘It becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality’ (MC 166). Once again, a closer examination of Rushdie’s motives reveals that this was all planned, and was an attempt to simply tell stories the way stories might be remembered and retold by an oral storyteller. Rushdie explains that one of the deliberate efforts in the book was to leave loose ends; I was very interested in the idea of implying a multitude of stories in one’s structure, through which one picked one narrative path. There are stories you just happen to bump into and that you never see again, or stories that are just fragments of themselves and not completed. It was structured to contain that kind of waste material in it as that was part of what I was trying to say.24

In the novel, the relationship between oral and written modes is reflected in and problematized by the juxtaposition of story and history. On the one hand, Saleem’s presentation of himself as a historian is given more gravitas by the very fact that Saleem tells us that he is writing his version of history. However, posited against his position as a transcriber of the ‘official’ history of his country – the newly independent India – is his status as oral storyteller, one which is asserted by the presence of a listener: the significantly illiterate, Padma. Padma, as Hewson notes, represents ‘a useful, heckling and critical (audience, one) who demands a certain kind of performance from the storyteller’.25 As his ‘necessary ear’ (MC 149), Padma often disputes what Saleem is saying and/or adds to and comments on his narrative and Saleem’s stories are most often directed at her: ‘You see, Padma: you’re going to find out now’ (MC 51). Consequently, Padma’s position within the narrative reinforces her role as both an active and interactive listener, or as Nancy Batty notes, the fact she is a ‘co-creator of his narrative’,26 serves to highlight the collaborative creation of story, thus protecting it from the bias of individual authority. Interestingly, one way to construe Saleem and Padma’s relationship is to see it within the context of the Nights tales, a reference which serves once again to assert the place of storytelling in the novel and which returns Rushdie to his own personal as well as cultural influences. The frame story of the Nights tells of a King Shahryar who shortly after he is married learns of his wife’s infidelity and consequently loses faith in womankind. In order to prevent this from happening again, he marries a different woman every day and executes her the next morning. However, eventually the king is cured of this bloodthirsty illness by a beautiful and beguiling storyteller called Scheherazade, who tells stories over a thousand and one nights, taking care to leave each story unfinished by morning so that she herself is not executed. This narrative frame allows for the

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insertion of an infinite number of stories, a representation of the place of the Nights in the oral storytelling tradition. Midnight’s Children owes a debt to the Nights as many critics have already pointed out. Saleem’s narrative does not simply follow one story with one basic plot, but is engaged in a constant process of telling stories where beginnings and endings become almost uncountable, producing an effect of a collection of embedded tales much like we find in the Nights. Indeed, as Nancy Batty has argued in an essay which traces the novel’s relationship to the Nights, the fact that ‘Midnight’s Children owes at least a small debt to Scheherazade’s tales is obvious’ and she correctly identifies that the Nights form ‘both the precept and the organizing principle of Saleem’s narrative’.27 However, there are a few notable differences. As Pier Paulo Piciucco observes: What substantially distinguishes MC from Arabian Nights in terms of structural approach, is that Sheherazade’s tales, although extremely entertaining, remain a set of discursive agents isolated from her personal predicament, while Saleem’s story is deeply amalgamated with his present development with Padma and, more relevantly still, the choice of the subject discussed makes it the focal point of the books.28

Indeed, this is established from the very beginning of the book a fact that relates to Midnight’s Children being rather like a bridge between oral and written storytelling traditions: in other words, between the realist, novelistic tradition and the oral storytelling tradition of folktales and lore. Although his narrative has only just begun, Saleem tells us that time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling over-used body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning – yes, meaning – something [. . .] And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumours, so dense a comingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. (MC 9)

In Midnight’s Children, history is thus presented as a collective construct, one that is inherently unreliable, one that encompasses many voices, and many versions. The vital importance that listening plays for Saleem in his role as storyteller is stressed by the very fact that he calls Padma his ‘necessary ear’; in other words,

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the implication is that without her, Saleem would not be able to tell his stories. Saleem places himself in the role of a male Scheherazade and places Padma in the role of the listening King Shahryar, but these roles are infused with a comic touch: Padma is far from a raging beauty and mocks any suggestion of ‘love’. However, her function as listener is essential and is asserted, when at one point in the narrative, she disappears, Saleem laments, ‘A balance has been upset; I feel cracks widening down the length of my body; because suddenly I am alone, without my necessary ear, and it isn’t enough’ (MC 149). The significance of the listening ear here highlights the importance of the origins of Saleem’s ‘written text’ to the oral storytelling roots, which is mirrored in the relationship between teller and listener, Saleem and Padma, Scheherazade and King Shahryar. The narrative is, therefore, primarily driven by the storyteller–listener relationship which emerges as not only more significant than the reader–writer relationship, but crucially is tied to its very existence. Although Saleem tells us that he is writing these stories down to ‘preserve them’ and he makes reference to his writing at various points throughout his narrative by addressing the reader, it is his relationship with Padma and their story exchange which drives the way he narrates. He says: ‘But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next’ (MC 38). Saleem seems not to trust the writing relationship with himself as a solitary individual and implicitly, he equally does not trust his relationship to the reader; indeed, this is perhaps simply driven by the fact the reader is not deemed to be as ‘necessary’ for him to write. Even when he acknowledges that he has ‘been left alone to write’ (MC 21), his admission proves to be illusory as he adds the appendage: ‘(Alone except for Padma at my feet)’ (MC 212). Significantly then, the asides he makes to the reader of his narrative are mostly about Padma, or are in some way linked directly to his storytelling performances and story telling. Saleem is constantly commenting on his exchanges with his intra-textual narratee Padma for the benefit of this absent audience, whose purpose is to bear witness to the storytelling performance. I greet Padma as she rushes to my desk, flounces down on the floor beside me, commands: ‘Begin.’ I give a little satisfied smile; feel the children of midnight queuing up in my head, pushing and jostling like Koli fishwives; I tell them to wait, it won’t be long now; I clear my throat, give my pen a little shake; and start. (MC 106)

At other points in the narrative, Saleem actually begins composing his text while simultaneously reading aloud his passages to Padma as a means of ‘testing

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out’ his written text on a very real audience.29 This is yet another way in which Rushdie asserts that stories are created collaboratively, and are subject to change. The audience to which the storyteller tells the story has as a large role to play in the way the tale is told and informs the final meaning of the story, which is reached collaboratively. In this way, the writerly author and the oral storyteller are brought together and are conjoined into one figure as are the traditions of literary and historical authorship and oral storytelling. More importantly perhaps, the place of storytelling is given primacy of the written text whereby the oral, communal process of crafting stories is preferred to the individual and solitary practice of ‘modern’ authorship. Luis Hatchard draws an interesting comparison between Midnight’s Children and the eighteenth-century autobiographical novel, exemplified by such texts as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which focused on the primacy of individual experience. For Hatchard the portrayal of individual experience has ‘no other aim than the search and final definition of the individual’s identity’.30 Reflective of this tendency, he notes that ‘many eighteenth century novels were entitled after their hero, [. . .] a tendency that still goes well into the nineteenth century as some of Dickens novels show’, the implication of which is that ‘the whole meaning of the novel is condensed into a single name’.31 Rushdie’s novel, is neither titled ‘Saleem Sinai’ after its eponymous fictional autobiographer, nor is it the individual’s importance expressed by the singular noun ‘Midnight’s Child’; instead, the novel expresses a plurality, ‘Midnight’s Children’ which Hatchard sees as a game, that ‘enhances the fragility of the concept of identity’.32 However, identity is not so much a ‘fragile’ concept but a more dynamically ‘shifting’ one. The novel’s insistence on plurality through Saleem’s constant interweaving of stories within stories of other lives is that which moves Midnight’s Children away from the conventional expectations of the realist novel and indeed, the Bildungsroman, and away from what Benjamin describes as its singular focus on ‘the meaning of life’. Rushdie’s novel shows us that the solitary individual story of the traditional novel does not allow for the representation of experience of contemporary (Indian) reality. It is precisely Rushdie’s point that Saleem’s narrative is unreliable. It is also his point to reveal that what Keith Booker sees as breaking down the ‘idea of a stable unified self ’, a self that is instead ‘revealed to be a fiction’,33 is not an ‘attack on the authority of the individual’34 but an assertion that there is no absolute authority or stable individual meaning. As Saleem says: ‘Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems – but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more

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and more incredible’ (MC 165). For Rushdie, any authority on the part of the narrator is misconceived, and is better understood if we place the narrator in the role of storyteller. Rather than expecting authority to come from an individual which we might expect from the individualist narrator of a novel, by placing the narrator in the role of storyteller, we can accept that authority (and thus ‘counsel’ or wisdom) can come from a variety of contradictory voices. As Benjamin describes, the storyteller tells narratives which came out of a ‘lived’ experience, of a community, not of an individual life. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem is thus importantly placed in the role of storyteller, one who can better negotiate the space between individual and collective stories and lives. As Indira Karmacheti notes: ‘His work is to reveal not only his own significance but also that of his nation by the stories he tells about both.’35 In Saleem’s digressive, uncertain, error-laden narrative, we see the past remembered as story, not as an authoritative narrative History, or Truth. The cracks we see in Saleem’s body, a literal representation of the history of India, are representative of the way that memory falters and turns history, whose content is made up of ‘real events, events that really happened’, into ‘imaginary events, events invented by the narrator’.36 The unreliability and fallibility of memory, therefore, serves as a means of destabilizing any belief in the ‘truth’ of History, and to supplant this notion with the more representative and ‘truthful’ (in its very fictiveness) world of ‘Story’. From this perspective it is not inconsequential to note that in a variety of languages the etymology of the words history and story reveal not only an ancestry, but a blurring of distinctions rather than a clear demarcation of meaning. Rushdie himself, having history as his academic discipline,37 is well aware of the smudged line of meaning between the two essentially ‘narrative’ modes. He says, ‘I do think the connection of history and story is important to remember. The Italian word storia means both things; the Urdu word qissa means a tale and it means history.’38 For Rushdie, it is important because I suppose I have always used a kind of historical method, in the completely unmethodical way which is the luxury of fiction. This connects the view I have that what is happening now is a return towards narrative in fiction.39

This return to narrative, in a sense, can be viewed as a return to the storyteller and returning history to its traditional place within the storyteller’s repertoire. Perhaps the return to the storyteller in the telling of history is better conceived as an acknowledgement of the relationship history has to storytelling and ultimately then, both to concepts of truth and fiction itself.

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Rushdie’s admission (above) of using a historical method in his fiction is demonstrated rather dramatically in Midnight’s Children. As David Lipscomb has eruditely highlighted, history and story are merged quite literally in the novel: Midnight’s Children contains whole passages and extracts from a published ‘Western’ history book: Stanley Wolpert’s A New History of India (1977). Lipscomb’s essay identifies the passages from Wolpert’s text and places them alongside those found in the novel, showing the extent to which they are reinterpreted, reworked and re-inscribed.40 Rushdie’s purpose, Lipscomb argues, is to point out the ‘inadequacies’ in Wolpert’s ‘official’ History, with Rushdie’s version often ‘mocking the historian’s posture of concentrating only on verifiable facts’.41 What is particularly of note, however, is the way that this is achieved; Lipscomb points out that, ‘Saleem (often) contests documented history with (certain) imaginative oral tale(s)’42 and the example he gives drawn from the novel include the oral legend of the Hummingbird, which is passed to Saleem by the betel chewers in ‘the spirit of storytelling’ and the oral tale from his cousin Zafar, which describes the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965. In this again we see the written tradition – history – posited against the oral – story. However, we can go one step further from the conclusions that Lipscomb draws and conclude that the oral story not only, as Lipscomb suggests, contests Wolpert’s history, but by creating new ways of knowing ‘official’ history also shows how memory can be a way of filling the gaps left by that official history and, therefore, returning history to its roots in story. In this way, it is the storyteller not the historian who comes out as the dominant figure, the storyteller who succeeds in returning history to its storytelling roots.43 Interestingly, Rushdie’s reworking of a British History book is significant in that it foregrounds not only the relationship between history and story, but also the relationship between the literary and oral storytelling traditions and their cultural legacies. This legacy finds its roots in the tradition of Indian literature, which in turn was influenced in the late nineteenth century by the European novel. In Meenakshi Mukherjee’s book Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (1994) she traces the influence of the concept of time on the Indian novel from post-renaissance Europe to the late nineteenth century. Mukherjee explains that ‘up until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prenovel tales were characterized by a ‘“once-upon-a-time” ambience where the tensions of time past and present are absent’, but ‘the emergence of this dynamic view of time’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, saw that ‘the structure of [. . .] European novels was indirectly based on the linear and sequential progression of events that happened along a temporal axis’, or in other words,

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the conceptualization of time changed.’44 Up until the late nineteenth century when the European novel began to reach Indian shores, Indian fiction, ‘did not have any tradition of [. . .] realism because it was based on a rather different view of reality’; here no concept of individualism and whose tales still lived in the marvellous, where ‘a realistic presentation of actual people or objects, interiors of buildings, was either absent or rare’.45 However, quite dramatically, at this time ‘a new and unprecedented interest in history [. . .] between Indian writers and their readers’ 46emerged, due to what Mukherjee identifies as four main factors: (a) general exposure to other cultures through the study of English; (b) awareness that Indians were different from the British and a consequent curiosity to understand the past that would account for the present; (c) rediscovery of Indian history in books that the British wrote about India; (d) the desire to rewrite these accounts from an indigenous point of view.47

Viewed from this perspective, Rushdie’s re-inscription of a British history book into a novel that foregrounds the communal storyteller of Eastern, oral storytelling traditions, draws it back to its roots and its cultural heritage. In this way he demonstrates what he argued for in his essay ‘Outside the Whale’ (1984) and echoes what Indian storytellers a century earlier had begun to contest: misrepresentations of India and the Indian people by (imposter) (hi)storytellers that were not part of the original community whose stories they told.48 Rushdie’s installation of the oral storyteller in the character of Saleem Sinai places back the stories of India into the body of the storyteller, demonstrating that they originate in him.

The Rushdie Affair: Satanic storytelling and the healing power of story It was the mid-1980s. Rushdie’s career was taking off. With three novels behind him, he was already emerging as a prominent voice in Anglo-Indian fiction. Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and a host of other prizes49 and his next novel, Shame, was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1983. However, the publication of his fourth novel The Satanic Verses – despite also being shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winning the Whitbread Novel Award – led to events which Rushdie could not have foreseen, events which were life-changing for Rushdie in a very personal and devastating way.

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On 14 February 1989, the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie deeming his novel blasphemous and an act punishable by death. Rushdie’s situation raised issues relating to censorship, to writing and responsibility, to what stories a storyteller is allowed to tell. The issuing of a fatwa against Rushdie became highly politicized; there were numerous demonstrations where books were burned and where people lost their lives. These events along with numerous others that followed resulted in Rushdie having to go into hiding under the protection of the British government, and here he remained until 1998 when the succeeding Iranian government withdrew the fatwa and announced they no longer supported his killing. It is in this state of flight, of constant movement and concealment, that Rushdie lived and experienced for the best part of a decade long after the media hype surrounding what came to be known as ‘The Rushdie Affair’ had subsided; like a fugitive, Rushdie was no longer a ‘free man’, nor was he able to ‘speak’ freely. In a journal entry he made at the time, he writes: ‘I am gagged and imprisoned. [. . .] I can’t even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream.’50 However, was speaking freely the same as telling stories? What place did fiction have in the world today? Throughout ‘The Rushdie Affair’, Rushdie’s insistence on the status of his novel, The Satanic Verses, as literature, as fiction51 remained (largely) persistent52 but it was not altogether acknowledged, or at least not acknowledged by all. Indeed, the numerous writings and debates it spawned, and that inevitably penetrated critical readings, made it impossible to focus on the ‘pure’ act of literary criticism. But then this also provided an important message. Rushdie’s plight not only projected the storyteller – as personified by Rushdie – onto the world stage proving ‘that fiction and writers of fiction are important’53 but also more pertinently, Rushdie’s self-dubbed ‘migrant’ position as an Anglo-Indian writer highlighted the issue of the ‘translatability or untranslatability’54 of story. The projection of the novel outside the confines of what seemed increasingly like the protected and esoteric world of Western liberalist academic criticism, threw it open to a larger interpretative audience, and in so doing highlighted the role of the novelist (or storyteller) as a (powerful) cultural producer. The question was whose culture was he producing (or representing)? If the writer is a cultural producer – literature being a product of (a) culture – how does cultural production operate? Does it operate solely on a national level or can it operate on a transnational level? What one culture/ nation/ ideology ‘allows’, is not the same as another. How, then, are these ideas played out in terms of

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world literature? Is the fact that literature is now operating in a globalized world, mean that it is also directed at a global audience and if so, does this necessitate a move towards ‘universals’? In the age of globalization where political, social and religious discourses present a plethora of competing narratives which blend and clash sometimes fruitfully and sometimes with devastating consequences, these questions are particularly poignant. Rushdie has documented this period of his life in his recent autobiographical memoir, Joseph Anton (2012) – the name he had adopted while in hiding.55 His book gives an account of how The Satanic Verses was conceived, which lends insight into the progression of ideas that he was exploring through his fiction from his first novel Grimus (1975) to this, The Satanic Verses, his fourth.56 Following the publication of his third novel Shame, Rushdie felt that ‘he had dealt, as well as he knew how to deal, with the worlds from which he had come’57 – the India or Pakistan of his childhood – and so in his next novel his aim was to investigate what he called the great matter of how the world joined up, not only how the East flowed into the West and the West into the East, but how the past shaped the present while the present shaped our understanding of the past, and how the imagined world, the location of dreams, art, invention, and, yes, belief, leaked across the frontier that separated it from the everyday, ‘real’ place in which human beings mistakenly believed they lived.58

The Satanic Verses differs from the former novels which are set mainly in India precisely because it seeks to link two different worlds, placing them in close proximity to each other as if they were engaged in conversation; indeed, Rushdie says that this novel, more than any other, was conceived as ‘a much more personal interior exploration, a first attempt to create a work out of his own experience of migration and metamorphosis: to him it was [ironically] the least political book of the three’59 (My emphasis). While on a long-haul flight from Sydney to India – a curiously apt symbol of the ideological, cultural and geographical worlds which the novel traversed – Rushdie describes the process of how he began to match his ideas to images and put together the bits of stories, characters, ‘fragments’60 as he calls them, which he would end up shaping the book. If, as Rushdie pondered, the act of migration ‘puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about the identity and self-hood and culture and belief ’,61 then it was important that as ‘a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes’62 (My emphasis). It is at this point in his formulations, that Rushdie is

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moved to ask: ‘How does newness enter into the world?’ and his answer, tellingly, was ‘the satanic verses’.63 The Satanic Verses, as its name implies, places itself from the very outset in the tradition of Satan (or Shaitan in the Islamic tradition). In the employment of this central metaphor, Rushdie borrows from both religious and secular texts – Christian (or biblical), Islamic, apocryphal and literary (fictional) sources. Indeed, a closer look at these sources and an understanding of who Satan or Shaitan is and his nature, brings us both to the idea of the migrant, the uprooted and exiled wanderer, and also curiously, back to the storyteller. In his account of the origins of Satan, Peter Awn, describes the two key incidents or ‘mythic events’64 in which the Islamic devil (Iblīs) appears in the holy Qu’ran. The first relates to ‘his confrontation with the newly created Adam’, which leads to his condemnation and banishment, and the second relates to his ‘revenge on mankind through the seduction of Adam.’65 After God creates Adam from clay Satan is told to bow before him, but he refuses, ‘convinced that his fiery essence raises him far above man’.66 It is this act of defiance which results in his banishment from the heavens and this which leads him to seek revenge on mankind and become a ‘seducer of men’; his seduction in the form of ‘whispers (waswasa)’67 leads to the Fall of Man. Interestingly, as Awn also notes, Satan, or ‘Iblīs, is placed within a tradition of jinn’ or djinn, which some scholars believe are ‘angels’ while others believe they are not because they are capable of ‘sin’.68 In both the Islamic and Christian traditions, Satan is associated not only with ‘seduction’ and the telling of fictions but also with the concept of sin, a transgression which can also be construed as ‘evil’. However, in the Islamic tradition, as Marlena Corcoran notes, the notion of a shaitan – from which Rushdie borrows more predominantly in the novel – ‘can be used in the sense of “genius”, much as in its original sense of inspiration by a spirit’. She explains that ‘belonging to the same order of ideas [. . .] is the belief that a poet was possessed by a shaitan who inspired his words. In this generic and morally neutral usage, all human poetry is satanic verse. In the playing on the synecdoche between Satan and all inspirational spirits, The Satanic Verses asks us to reflect on the transmission of fictions both sacred and profane.69 This interpretation marries with the symbolism Rushdie employs in the novel surrounding the figure of Satan. Although the name ‘satanic verses’ refers to a contentious incident relating to Muhammed’s revelation of the Holy Qu’ran,70 it is not necessarily the key or singular point of reference for Rushdie’s conception of the symbol of Satan in the novel. A further reference, one which links the novel to dissident literature, to novelistic origins and to the figure of the migrant,

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is found in the epigraph of the novel and is an extract from Daniel Defoe’s A History of the Devil (1726). It reads: Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire of liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is . . . without fixed space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.71

It is this quote and the presentation of Satan, ‘the archetypal exile who haunts the myths of origin of all three monotheistic faiths’,72 which resonate with Rushdie’s above conception of the novel, one which foregrounds the figure of the migrant and the migrant experience. As Martine Dutheil explains: ‘By placing his narrative under the aegis of Defoe’s The History of the Devil, the novelist establishes a filiation with a contestatory writer and simultaneously displaces his project by focusing on the representation of the migrant as the Devil and no longer, as in Defoe, on the Devil as migrant.’73 If we return now to Rushdie’s conception of the novel, one which is founded as he said on his own personal experience of migration and metamorphosis, the symbolic use of the figure of Satan – drawn from two traditions, from secular and religious world-views – within the context of a novel, becomes clearer: Satan represents the migrant experience, a migrant who needs to tell stories to make sense of the world. In Joseph Anton Rushdie reiterates this point while also confirming the clear link that Satan has to the storyteller. He explains: This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half this, half that, denied the rooted person’s comforting, defining sense of having a solid ground beneath their feet. So, from the life of the archangel and the archdevil, in which his own sympathy lay on the devil’s side, because as Blake and Milton, a true poet was of the Devil’s party.74

In light of this, Dutheil’s reading of the novel begins to resonate with Rushdie’s own literary project: to see how the world joined up or to perform the crisis it describes. Dutheil further explicates: The Satanic Verses is haunted by the mystery of origins and the paradoxical nature of literary creation which, unlike the sacred text, can never begin at the beginning and in the first place. [. . .] It juxtaposes references to the systems of belief of several religions (Christian and Muslim notions of the fall, the Hindu idea of karma), images of biological birth, reference to the Big Bang, tales of storks and roses, and jumbles allusions to religious literary, scientific and

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cinematographic forebearers, in a mock-homage to the inexhaustible variety of accounts of origin through which we construct a sense of identity. An important effect of this accumulative strategy is to unsettle the hierarchy between the discourses of authority (whether scientific or religious) and of popular culture. In Rushdie’s view, ‘origin’ is thus always already split, diverse, multiple.75

Dutheil’s reading highlights what is already an established view of Rushdie’s fiction as engaging with questions of identity, hybridity, rootlessness, origins and authority. From this perspective, we could see Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses as continuing the project he began in Midnight’s Children, namely the questioning of authority through story, or fiction. Whereas in Midnight’s Children it is history that is contested by story, in The Satanic Verses it is divine history that is contested. To conjure the Devil then, is not only to conjure the age-old battle of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’, but also to question authority and truth through fiction: and it is this which for some proves contentious. As Dutheil notes: ‘far from being external to the nation or the self, otherness is not only on the inside but also at the origin’.76 In this sense, the novel suggests that we are all migrants, all storytellers like the Devil, since we are all fallen and sit outside the realms of truth. Satan thus becomes the symbol of the quintessential storyteller. To return now to Rushdie’s initial conception of the novel, which began as an exploration into migration and metamorphosis and was aimed at discovering how the world joined up, based on events outside the world of the text and story, we might conclude that it doesn’t really join up or, perhaps, at best that joining up is problematic. The metamorphosis of one of the two key protagonists in the novel, Saladin Chamcha, into a ‘demi-goat’ (SV 163), ‘a fucking Packy billy’ (SV 163), a ‘Beelzebub?’ (SV 67) – a satirized version of the experience of IndoPakistani (im)migrants to Britain– was in a cruelly ironic yet equally horrifying twist of fate, turned on himself by (fundamentalist) Muslims. Rushdie symbol of Satan was thrown back at him as a form of attack and he suddenly found himself no longer the Salman his friends knew but the Rushdie who was the author of Satanic Verses, a title subtly distorted by the omission of the initial The. The Satanic Verses was a novel. Satanic Verses were verses that were satanic, and he was their satanic author, ‘Satan Rushdy’, the horned creature on the placards carried by demonstrators down the streets of a faraway city, the hanged man with protruding red tongue in the crude cartoons they bore. Hang Satan Rushdy. How easy it was to erase a man’s past and to construct a new version of him, an overwhelming version, against which it seemed impossible to fight.77

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Rushdie’s description here is dramatic, poignant and very real. In it, we do not simply get the stark picture of the immediate effect the book had on a global scale and the larger questions it raised about religious blasphemy and the role and purpose of fiction, but we glimpse the personal horror of a man who days, weeks before, was at the height of his literary powers; this man’s world was literally transformed overnight. The success of Midnight’s Children, and Shame which had earned Rushdie a reputation as a significant voice for an emergent Anglo-Indian fiction, and whose importance was simultaneously reflected in growing critical interest in his work, was suddenly and dramatically eclipsed, in a very personal, intimate and devastating way. Indeed, it is the horrifying personal story here, the story of Rushdie the man whose life was suddenly in danger and who was being demonized for ‘telling stories’, which has a particular resonance with the figure of the storyteller, one that very much informs his writing and our reading of his subsequent novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Rushdie’s situation ironically echoes that of the figure of Satan that he represented and conceived of in The Satanic Verses. Finding himself literally ‘unhoused’, a man on the run, both exiled and unable to return to his country (India/Pakistan), he was exiled from his home and family. In some ways this situation placed him in a similar position to a fugitive, or even a refugee, whose experience of exile is one of inherent trauma. This point is not inconsequential and its relevance to both the thematic content and impetus behind and meaning of Haroun is great. In his stimulating and insightful book The Politics of Storytelling (2006), the anthropologist Michael Jackson gives a startling account of trauma as experienced by refugees, which in many ways mirror the effect that the fatwa had on Rushdie’s life and his subsequent decade of hiding.78 Jackson notes: Trauma stuns, diminishes, and petrifies. The shocking suddenness of refugee flight transforms a person almost instantly from subject to object. ‘Who’ he or she was is eclipsed by the question of ‘what’ he or she has become: mere physicality, a category term, an objective label – a refugee. For these reasons, the critical question for the refugee and for anyone writing about refugee experience, is an existential one: how can this immobilisation, reduction, and nullification of the person be resisted and transfigured, so that self-determination and power is regained.79

In Rushdie’s description of the events following the fatwa (above), we can see this nullification and ‘transfiguration’ of the individual Rushdie, perfectly

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mapped: his past had been erased and a ‘new version of him’ had been constructed. Having been transformed from a ‘who’ to a ‘what’, Rushdie was a man no longer in control of his own destiny, a man who was also afraid and who had to deal with the very real situation he was now living. However, it was at this point, when Rushdie’s son Zafar, a boy who was equally trying to understand the events that had caused him to ‘lose’ his father, that led him to ask: ‘Dad, why don’t you write books I can read?’.80 It was also this boy that then asked his father to write a book for him. Rushdie notes at this juncture: ‘You should never break a promise made to a child, he thought, and then his whirling mind added the idiotic rider, but is the death of the author a reasonable excuse?81 Rushdie’s comment here, tries to make light of a situation which was clearly traumatic, one had such a tremendous impact on this life that it would be unreasonable to assume that this would not influence his fiction. As Nico Israel pertinently points out in his book Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora (2000), any analysis of Rushdie’s novels written during the nearly decade-long fatwa period82 not only serve in effect as counterpoints to his more celebrated, journalistic responses to the fatwa (expressing, by turns, defiance, contrition, religious conversion, renewed defiance, and various combinations thereof) ‘but significantly, could be productively read under the lens of trauma’, (my emphasis) and as a result, ‘demand careful analysis in their own right’.83

It is under this lens of trauma that we must read Haroun, which I will turn to presently. However, what makes this reading particularly poignant is that it is the adoption of the position of the storyteller and the act of storytelling itself that help Rushdie through the trauma and help him to heal. Whether known or unbeknown to him, the social power of storytelling, aside from the properties that Rushdie already outlined from his own experience of stories learnt in childhood, has therapeutic and healing properties.84 As Jackson argues in his book, in the case of trauma victims, such as refugees, or the trauma that Rushdie experienced, storytelling helps the victim reclaim their humanity by helping turn ‘object into subject, giveness into choice, what into who’.85 This is vitally important, Jackson contends, because without stories, without listening to one another’s stories, there can be no recovery of the social, no overcoming of our separateness, no discovery of common ground, or common cause. Nor can the subject be made social. There can only remain a residue of tragic events, as disconnected from each other as

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the individuals who have experienced their social lives engulfed and fractured by them.86

Perhaps luckily for Rushdie, he did write a book, one which clearly had resonance and spoke to his son of the situation he was in. But he already had the tools with which to tell his story: storytelling was in his blood, was actually his vocation. For Rushdie, the message that the power of storytelling and the storyteller are so strong that they have the power to heal – to change the world – are even more resonant as they echo the very subject and concerns of his fiction. They also echo the intimate relationship to the storyteller that Rushdie had inherited from his own parents. Perhaps this is why his rediscovery of a previously discarded story,87 in which we find the original conception of Haroun’s two tribes – ‘the Guppees, a chatterbox people, and the Chupwalas, among whom a cult of silence has grown up and who worship a stone deity called Bezaban, that is, without a tongue’88 – Rushdie realizes: that this little tale about a war between language and silence could be given a meaning that was not only linguistic; that hidden inside it was a parable about freedom and tyranny whose potential he finally understood. The story had been ahead of him, so to speak, and now his life had finally caught up.89

Haroun and the Sea of Stories, reading aloud and parent storyteller The oral beginnings of Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories find their roots in the bath-time stories that Rushdie would tell his son, Zafar, when he was a little boy. Rushdie explains, It was not so much a bedtime story but a bath-time story, something I’d tell him when he was in the bath, or while I wrapped him in towels. I would have these basic motifs, like the Sea of Stories, but each time I would improvise.90

It is in the act of telling these stories orally to his son that we witness Rushdie as storyteller, an act that also echoes the storytelling relationship that he had experienced as a child with his own father. As I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, it was Rushdie’s father who told him tales from the great collections of oral tales such as the Nights, the Katharitsagara and The Conference of Birds, all of which are purposely alluded to in this novel. The first of these is echoed in the title of the novel: the motif

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of the ‘sea of stories’ is drawn from Somadeva’s The Kathasaritsagara, or ‘The Ocean of the Streams of Story’, an old Sanskrit collection of tales which Rushdie notes, ‘wasn’t actually a sea’, but became one at Rushdie, the storyteller’s instigation. Following the storytelling tradition of his father, Rushdie employs the metaphor of the ocean with Zafar as he reworked and retold him stories that came from this and other oral, literary and imaginative sources. He explains: ‘While Zafar was having his bath, his dad would take a mug and dip it into his son’s bathwater and pretend to sip, and to find a story to tell, a story-stream flowing through the bath of stories.’91 The novel takes this liquid metaphor of the ‘sea of stories’ and creates a fictional universe which is about the fostering of the parent–child relationship through the act of storytelling, directly mirroring the relationship which Rushdie had with his own father and that he now shared with his son. Set in the fantastical world of Alifbay (the Hindustani word for Alphabet),92 the novel begins with an invitation from the young hero Haroun to follow the narrative’s numerous story threads and search for clues to two perplexing questions: where do all these stories come from? and what is the point of stories that aren’t even true? (H 22). Haroun’s questions are directed to his father, Rashid Khalifa, a legendary storyteller by profession who suddenly loses his ability to tell stories when his wife leaves him for another man, one who stands for the very opposite of the fiction-creating Rashid: facts. In answer to his first question, Haroun learns that the source of stories come from ‘the Ocean of the Streams of Stories’ and that all stories were held there in fluid form [that] they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive. (H 72)

The novel’s presentation of the source of the storyteller’s stories as an ‘ocean’ made up of ‘streams of story’ places the storyteller, and thus implicitly Rushdie, into an oral storytelling tradition where stories circulate in a fluid way, much like the way Rushdie has reused and reworked the image of the ‘ocean’ in Haroun. This capacity of the oral tradition to allow movement and change is juxtaposed again against that of the written tradition whose stories are presented as ‘dead’ or static due to the fixity of words. This is the first way in which the novel asserts the primacy of the oral storytelling tradition and its importance over the written tradition.

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For the boy-protagonist Haroun, the quest to find the source of stories marks the beginning of a fantastical journey into the imagination where he leaves Alifbay and enters into the world Kahani (literally story) to search for answers. This entry into story is instigated by an encounter with two magical companions – a Water Genie significantly called Iff and a Hoopoe bird called Butt – who, in bringing the words ‘if and but’ together, create the circumstances for Haroun to begin his quest to find the reasons for and sources of stories. The appearance of the Hoopoe bird is the second of the allusions to oriental stories and comes from Farid Ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of Birds. In these tales, the hoopoe bird is one that persuades the other birds to begin a quest to find their king – a symbol of one who leads them ‘along the path of righteousness’.93 This allusion is importantin that it relates to the stories’s didactic quality and the capacity for story to benefit those who listen to it. In Attar’s poem, it is the Hoopoe’s eloquence, his ability to persuade the birds significantly, through the telling of stories, to begin their quest, which affords the bird the position of storyteller. In the novel, therefore, as Andrew Teverson states: ‘The hoopoe thus comes to represent both the ancient tradition of Sanskirt storytelling [. . . and] as in Attar’s poem [. . .] signals Rushdie’s connection with an ancient Sanskrit tradition.’94 Indeed, as we now recognize, it also links him directly to his family tradition. Haroun, thus, begins his quest where he is not only searching for the origins of story, but is also prompted to question the storyteller’s role and the truth or reality of fictions.95 The child and extra-textual reader of the novel, in identifying with Haroun, are also urged to ask the same questions. In Haroun this storytelling relationship between father and son functions at the foundational level of the novel and is inscribed into the very fabric of the narrative voice, echoing that of the parent-storyteller. In other words, in the voice of the narrator, we can almost ‘hear’ the voice of the parent telling the story to his child – we can ‘hear’ Rushdie telling stories to Zafar. The significance of this works on a variety of levels in the novel, but primarily it serves to highlight oral storytelling, and recreate for the child through the narrative the illusion of listening to a storyteller telling a story, of being present in a live storytelling performance. For Rushdie, this sense of being able to listen to the story being read, the telling of stories orally, had deep personal significance. The dramatic and life-changing events following the publication of The Satanic Verses had such a profound effect on him that his faith in many things (as I mentioned earlier) faltered; in fact, Rushdie began to question, for the first time in his

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life, whether he should continue to write or simply give it up. He notes of that time: It has never occurred to him before the attack to stop writing, to be something else, to become not a writer. To have become a writer – to discover that he was able to do the thing he had most wanted to do – had been one of his greatest joys. The reception of The Satanic Verses had [. . .] robbed him of that joy, not because of fear but on account of a deep disappointment. If one spent five years of one’s life struggling with a large and complex project, trying to wrestle it to the ground, to bring it under control and give it all the shapely beauty his talent allowed – and if, when it came out, it was received in this distorted, ugly way, then maybe the effort wasn’t worth it. If that was what he got for making his best effort, then he should perhaps try doing something else.96

Indeed, the fact that he was compelled to go into hiding left him in a situation in which he was forced to spend stretches of time away from his son. Thus, when he began to write Haroun, the act of inscribing the voice of his storyteller-persona into the novel provided him with a means of bridging his distance from Zafar, which was a solace for both during his necessary absence. Moreover, the very act of writing (and, implicitly, storytelling) the novel not only served to provide Zafar with a real sense of his father’s presence, but also more importantly, functioned as a consoling and healing act for Rushdie. Much like the storyteller Rashid, Rushdie’s personal story reflects his own and Zafar’s: Rashid loses his ‘Gift of the Gab’ only to find it again, through the act of telling the story. The fact the story mirrors his life so explicitly – the act of writing about the telling of oral stories from a father Rashid (Rushdie) the storyteller to his son Haroun (Zafar’s middle name) – was a therapeutic act,97 helping Rushdie to find his faith in telling stories again, helping him to continue to be a writer-storyteller. As he explains himself: ‘It was Zafar who finally brought him back to himself [. . .] Zafar who reminded him of his promise: “Dad, what about my book?”’98 Critical interest in Haroun relative to Rushdie’s other novels is small, a tendency which Rosalía Baena attributes to a view of it as ‘a minor work’,99 and one that might equally be a reflection of its status as a children’s novel. However, also of note is that the majority of the readings of the novel are written in the 1990s, in the years when Rushdie was still very much in hiding a fact that suggests that those scholars who wrote about the novel close to the time of its publication, were perhaps more inclined to see the novel in this way. In this regard, Baena’s assumption may contain some truth particularly if we adhere to the beliefs that

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children’s novels do not deal with complex adult issues (the kinds of issues that Rushdie’s prior novels were preoccupied with) and that they are characterized as being more ‘simple, action-oriented, didactic and optimistic’.100 Indeed, in many ways, Rushdie’s Haroun displays many of these characteristic features of children’s literature and the novel works very much on this level: there are didactic elements, the narrative is driven by action similar to a fairy-tale quest, and there is definitely a ‘happy’ ending.101 However, importantly, the novel also displays many features that place it in a ‘hybrid’ position vis-à-vis its audience: it is not necessarily only directed at children and, in this sense, it is also reflective of trends in contemporary children’s literature as a whole. As Maria Nickolajeva argues, contemporary children’s literature has long began to push its own genre parameters; a growing number of writers exhibit characteristics of ‘mainstream’ adult (postmodern) literature such as ‘genre eclecticism, disintegration of traditional narrative structures, polyphony, intersubjectivity, and metafiction’,102 a fact that moves them into a position of ‘in-between’. Although Baena talks less of how Rushdie fits into contemporary children’s literature and looks instead at how Rushdie manipulates the fairy tale (as a representative form of ‘traditional’ children’s literature), her paper on Haroun (largely) adheres to this view. Considering Rushdie is not a children’s writer, and Rushdie scholars look at his work in the light of his status as a writer of ‘literary’ fiction directed at an adult audience, it is perhaps not surprising that Rushdie’s novel, until recently, has not received as much critical attention as his previous novels. However, what is useful to take from Baena’s reading and from the perspective of children’s literature is that Haroun stands precisely in the ‘in-between’. Baena’s point that ‘less attention has been paid to Haroun as a modern fairy tale for both adults and children’103 (my emphasis) is thus an important one, and one we should take note of. As I argue in my reading of Haroun in this section, it is precisely this perspective of the novel as a novel written for both the child and the adult audience which helps us to come to fuller understanding of it. Not only does this allow us to gain a deeper insight into the way the narrative has been constructed and how this, in turn, reflects the thematic concerns and ideas that the novel raises itself, but also importantly, it helps us to view Haroun as paradigmatic of the development of Rushdie’s ideas about fiction which we have seen in his previous novels (namely, Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses). As I will be arguing in this section, this entry point into the novel becomes particularly poignant if we also consider the novel as a narrative of healing and one whose central symbol is the storyteller and his the importance of ‘stories’.104

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The novel’s dual capacity to raise issues that are pertinent to both children and adults fits with Rushdie’s own conception of the novel. He notes: I began to devise the yarn that eventually became Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and felt strongly that if I could strike the right note it should be possible to write the tale in such a way as to make it of interest to adults as well as children: or, to use the phrase beloved of blurbists, to ‘children from seven to seventy’.105

This admission is revealing in the sense that, regardless of whether we think the novel achieves this appeal to both children and adults, Rushdie had both audiences in mind: adult and child. If we look closer at the reasons for Rushdie writing the novel – he was writing it for his son – and marry this with the traumatic situation Rushdie was living at the time, this becomes especially poignant. It is in this sense that Baena’s statement rings particularly true: ‘Rushdie, highly aware of the dynamism of the childhood world of imagination and its potential for empowerment, uses it in order to convey a double message, both political and metafictional.’106 Indeed, Rushdie’s two admissions – the first being, ‘I couldn’t have written an adult novel . . . I didn’t have the distance or the calm’107 and the second, that ‘I became very interested in happy endings’,108 also attest to this. Given that the novel is primarily a very personal story and intricately linked to Rushdie and Zafar’s reality, it is perhaps inevitable that the voice of the narrator echoes that of the storyteller. As Baena equally observes: ‘The voice of the narrator leads the reader into the experience, accompanying the child in the adventures, venturing to comment on events and encouraging further fantasy. This narrator assumes the strategy and stance of a storyteller who addresses the audience directly.’109 Indeed, she correctly identifies phrases and formulas in the novel which exemplify this act of address by a storyteller, such as ‘There was once a . . .’ (H 15), ‘Now I must tell you quickly about everything that happened while Haroun was away’ (H 179), or ‘as you will have guessed’ (H 206), expressions that we saw inscribed into the narrative voice of the storyteller-narrator Saleem of Midnight’s Children. Indeed, the use of the firstperson narrative voice speaking to a second person signalled through the use of the second person, pronoun ‘you’, lends an immediacy to the narrative, and a helps to reinforce the (albeit illusory) presence of the storyteller. For Baena, the importance of this technique – which she calls the ‘literary orality’ – in Haroun, is that it ‘implicates the reader more directly in the experience, drawing the child into the fantasy and obliging him or her to participate by cooperating through imagination.’110 Moreover, it is the participatory aspect of

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the storytelling experience, one that is collaboratively created by the storyteller and his audience, that the novel tries to bring to life and that echoes ‘real’ storytelling practices. Although Baena correctly identifies the voice of the storyteller in the voice of the narrator, given the fact that we have established the intricate links between Haroun and Rushdie’s real life, we can take Baena’s reading one step further and see the voice of the narrator as being positioned not only as a storyteller situated within the text, but also as an embodied storyteller who appears outside the text, mediated through the voice of a (grand)parent (or other adult reader). The directive voice of the narrator storyteller invites and/or directs an actual and embodied speaking (grand)parent-storyteller to read the novel aloud. Primarily, as Haroun is a personal story written from an absent father to his absent son,111 this ability for the storyteller to be appropriated by the voice of the adult who reads it aloud is not surprising. Zafar’s reading of the novel might have been experienced at times with, and at others without the presence of his father. In both cases, it accounts for why Rushdie places such importance on speech, orality and voice in this novel. However, Haroun works not only on a personal level, but on a communal level too. In the act of reading aloud, the storyteller’s voice is heard and resonates from the mouth of every parent (or grandparent) who reads the story to his child. This relationship then moves from solitary reader (the child) to collective reader (the parent) and listener, from an individual to a communal experience. Through the voice of the reader (narrating in the narrator’s voice), Rushdie’s novel thus performs an act of ventriloquism: it literally moves from a written to a spoken medium, from an individual to a collective experience, a narrative feat that only a storyteller, not an author, could achieve. The reading (and telling) of stories to children is a practice which goes back millennia, but one that is still very much alive to this day, one which every parent (and grandparent) all around the world engages in. Storytelling to children finds its roots in the fairy-tale and folk narrative tradition, and has been important primarily due to its didactic capacity: story has an inherent ability to teach. Indeed, Benjamin recognizes the fairy tale for this capacity as well as recognizing the importance of the storyteller behind the tale. He states: ‘The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children, and thus of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be a teller of fairytales.’112 In Haroun the fact that storyteller is not only presented intra-textually, but also moves into an extra-textual position in the person of the parent who assumes this role, not only foregrounds the ‘oral voice’ and reality of the

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storytelling experience, but in so doing also serves to reinforce the message that the novel is imparting: ‘the moral of the story’ is something that is approached, experienced and performed collaboratively by both parent and child. Rushdie’s desire, therefore, to write a book that would appeal to ‘children from seven to seventy’ takes on a more poignant meaning. In her study of oral storytelling traditions throughout the world, Anne Pellowski provides various examples of storytelling practices in the home which are specifically geared towards children. Although storytelling, the practice of oral storytelling, is most often associated with (and observed in) ‘traditional’ and often primary oral or illiterate societies, as Pellowski notes, family storytelling is not restricted to ‘the so-called “traditional” societies’, nor is it solely practiced ‘among economically poor classes who have little access to other entertainment’,113 but by all types of people and goes beyond historical, cultural and societal class. Indeed, in the majority of cultures, it is a story’s didactic capacity which is highlighted. For the people of Ghana, for example, stories are there ‘to teach basic lessons in obedience, kindness, courage, honesty, and other virtues through indirect example’.114 Similarly in Kenya, the Akamba tell stories which include ‘a moral or virtue’115 – an echo of Benjamin’s key elements present in storytelling – and for the Native Americans, storytelling to children takes on great significance because of its ethical dimension. As Yellowman, a Navajo storyteller, explains: ‘If my children hear the stories, they will grow up to be good people, if they don’t they will turn out to be bad’.116 However, as well as the didactic element, which might serve to instruct children in a variety of ways from life lessons to religious and societal codes and practices, storytelling for children necessitates the need to listen simply for entertainment, for education and fun. In Haroun, many of these elements resonate and serve to instruct both child and adult through the shared storytelling experience. As is echoed in the folktale practices of oral storytelling traditions, stories need to be enjoyed in order to capture the attention of the (child) listener and keep him listening. However, the importance of ‘careful’ and ‘attentive’ listening is also stressed, because the didactic element of stories, the message or moral each story contains, becomes vitally important to children. Through stories, they learn about right and wrong, good and evil, truth and reality. As Pierre Durix notes: Haroun can also be read as an allegory of the art of the story-teller. Rushdie obeys the rules of traditional oral narration: to him, stories should be first of all interesting and entertaining. They can also be illustrative of certain moral principles. But this need not take the form of boring moralizing.117

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In Durix’s reading of the novel, he usefully highlights the novel’s ability to speak to both adult and child about issues which concern them on an individual and collective level. Durix recognizes that the Haroun is unlike Rushdie’s previous novels which are directed at an exclusively adult audience. He says, that Haroun ‘has no apparent direct relevance to Indian or Pakistani history, to the plight of the immigrant in Britain or the question of religion’, noting that both its ‘mood and framework of reference are most definitely those of a story for children.’118 Nevertheless, Durix also makes the point that there are ‘a number of allusions [. . .] to realities or texts which a child could not possibly understand’, a fact, therefore, that invites the reader ‘to consider the novel as belonging to the sub-genre of the children’s story which only adults can really understand.’119 This fact is noteworthy and lends an interesting insight into the way this operates, particularly if the novel is read collaboratively. Haroun’s didactic strand operates on a number of levels. It is first didactic in the sense that it teaches both the child and the adult to ‘tell stories’ – in other words – it instructs on the art of storytelling. Rushdie reinforces the idea of performance from an oral storyteller in various ways. Indeed, as I shall explore, Rushdie seems to have written the story with the explicit aim of aiding the reading aloud storytelling performance. Through punctuation, repetition, capitalization, the use of rhyme and onomatopoeic words, all serve to ‘guide’ the reader towards reading the text in a particular way – for the silent reader, this can function on the level of ‘hearing’ the voice in his head – and for the reader who is the reading aloud, it prompts him/her to speak the words in a particular way. Although writing may not be able to reproduce oral storytelling, Rushdie proves that it can be written in such a way as to guide the reading aloud storytelling performance and guides children’s learning. This is important for children because, as Ellin Greene observes: Both storytelling and reading aloud are important to creating and sustaining children’s interest in books and reading. [. . .] reading aloud does for a literate society what the telling of folktales does for a folk society.120

Another possibility would be that the text was read together by both parent and child. The parent might encourage the child to read along, or to read out certain parts, with which the child might identify. This is also formative for children as: ‘Storytelling at its best is mutual creation. Children listen and, out of the words they hear, create their own mental images; this opening of the mind’s eye develops the imagination.’121

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The storytelling performance not only ‘teaches’ the parent (how) to tell stories, but inadvertently, has the dual effect of also serving to teach the child. Anne Trousdale’s research, which examines the effects of storytelling between parent (or adult) and child, moves beyond the question of determining ‘the value of reading to children’, (my emphasis) a fact which she notes is ‘well established’, but instead looks at ‘the value of storytelling with children’.122 In her qualitative study, in which she read stories to a child over a period of time, she finds that storytelling becomes ‘a cooperative venture’123 where meaning is negotiated, enacted and interpreted collaboratively by both adult and child. In other words, the process of reading to children, instigates the process of reading with children. In the examples she gives, the shared experience of collaborative storytelling not only allows but also prompts the child who grows in confidence through the storytelling experience, to move ‘easily from the role of listener to the role of teller and teller-participant, calmly and authoritatively taking over segments of the story to tell (or create) himself.’124 In this way, it is not only the parent who assumes the role of storyteller, but the child him/herself. If we apply this to Haroun this takes on a greater resonance. The storyteller role can not only be appropriated by the parent (mirrored in the character of Rashid) but can also be appropriated by the child, who can take on the role of Haroun. Rushdie was not only teaching his son how to storytell and passing on this tradition to him, but also how this tradition was being passed on through the very act of reading his novel, from all parents to children, or to whoever was reading the book. The storytelling relationship founded upon collaborative telling, one that is mediated between the oral and printed word, has a particular resonance and poignancy when applied to the reading of Haroun. As Haroun is about a young boy and his father and about the nature of storytelling the novel has already mapped out roles for parent and child to identify with. Whether or not this is done by voicing and performing these roles together, which would make the experience even more powerful, or by other forms of shared reading, there is a pedagogic function and a lesson in the collaborative reading experience both for and between parent and child. In this sense, Rushdie’s novel becomes an instruction book for the parent-storyteller and the child in the art of storytelling. In both its themes, and its content, it guides them both on how to tell stories, encouraging them to continue this tradition for themselves. Story-telling provides the opportunity to interpret for the child life forces which are beyond his immediate experience, and so to prepare him for life itself. It gives the teller the chance to emphasize significance rather than incident. It

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enables her, through the magic quality of the spoken word, to reveal to the child the charm and subtle connotations of word sounds, all the evanescent beauty emanating from combinations of words and from the cadence, the haunting ebb and flow, of rhythmical prose. It is through the medium of interpretation that all of us, adults and children, come to genuine appreciation [. . .] Story-telling, rightly done, is such an art.125

In order to emphasize the fact that Haroun is being told orally, the novel is positively replete with references to speech that point us to the oral storyteller and oral storytelling practices. This insistence on orality and the spoken word is stressed throughout the narrative in numerous ways, not only through the intertextual links to the ancient storytelling collections, but also in the way Rushdie uses language in the text: at discourse level. For example, the text often employs unusual instances of capitalization that are not tied to proper nouns: ‘The Unthinkable Thing’ (H 26); ‘Different Sort of Thrill’ (H 36); ‘Middle of Nowhere’ (H 68). The misuse of capitalization here, which accentuates phrases and elevates them to the status of textual ‘headings’ or ‘subheadings’, when considered within the context of a text that might be read aloud, becomes more resonant. In this case, the use of capitalization might be construed as an indication of word stress in pronunciation or could thus act as a signpost to put emphasis on a word or to say it louder. By disobeying the rules of punctuation – which in turn emphasizes a particular word so that the reader has to ‘hear’ it (even internally) – Rushdie creates the overall effect of reinforcing speech or oral storytelling. Particularly for a reader-cum-storyteller in the act of reading aloud, this has the additional effect of influencing the storytelling performance and bringing it alive. The implicit emphasis on voice helps guide the parent in their own storytelling performance, teaching them how to tell stories. In the context of children’s novels this becomes even more crucial. As Ellin Greene notes: ‘Folklorists consider the physical and social environment in which the story is told essential for an understanding of its meaning, and the storyteller’s voice, gestures, and interaction with the listeners are as important as the story itself.’126 If we apply this to the shared experience of parent–child story-telling, Rushdie’s Haroun, therefore, moves both the child and the parent towards constructing a shared as well as personal understanding of the story’s meaning. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, for Rushdie, the oral storytelling tradition was experienced as a living tradition and passed on to him both through his family and also his Indian heritage. In Suchismita Sen’s reading of the novel, she explores more broadly how the language that Rushdie

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employs in the novel borrows from Indo-English dialects and their respective oral storytelling practices.127 In terms of oral storytelling practices, Sen notes that the oral storytelling tradition has a very broad influence on South Asian communication processes such that, ‘the highway jingles (that intersperse Haroun) resemble the rhyming phrases, or set oral formulas in the repertoires of storytellers, which act as keys to the process of recollection and recitation’.128 Particularly for ‘the majority of the illiterate population’,129 this is of key import. Indeed, the use of ‘heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions, antitheses, in alliterations and assonances, in epithetic and other formulary expressions’,130 like the clichés and proverbs, which fill Haroun, is actually a feature of oral peoples. As Walter Ong notes, in order to solve ‘the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you had to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns shaped for oral recurrence’.131 Although not directly modeled on oral narrative, as is Midnight’s Children, in Haroun, these features abound and thus serve to reinforce the very notion of storytelling and its importance in the text. The novel’s insistence on the spoken word is limitless: there are constant and consistent references to speech and oral processes all of which stress the importance of telling stories. For example, the novel has numerous references to verbs describing different manners of speaking. Characters are relentlessly in the process of: speaking, yelling, yodelling, quarrelling, arguing, chattering, moaning, hissing, reciting, chortling, snorting, muttering or even harrumphing. The Plentimaw fishes who ‘always go in twos’ and ‘are faithful partners for life’, express their ‘perfect union’ by speaking ‘only and always in rhyme’ (H 85). Princess Batcheat is noted for her singing, albeit through her ‘horrible voice’ (H 186). Examples of onomatopoeic words include: ‘Phoo!’ (H 47), ‘Ka-bam, Ka-blooey-ka-patt!’ (H 74), ‘hic, cough’ (H 122). Clichés include: ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’ and ‘as large as life’ (H 207–10). The list is endless. The overall effect of this not only reinforces the oral aspect of telling a story and aids the reading aloud experience, but also, as a consequence of this, moves the reader(s) and/or listener(s) away from the solipsistic relationship that a solitary reader often experiences with a book. Haroun not only contains a plethora of onomatopoeic words, rhymes and jingles, all of which reinforce the oral word, but also speech, chatter and ‘excessive talk in general’ (H 84) are highlighted through the use of names in the novel. First, the act of naming itself is significant. As Ong reveals, it is a feature of oral people to ‘commonly think of names, as conveying power over things, (because) sound and especially oral utterance which come from inside living organisms are dynamic’.132 In Haroun, Rashid holds the power of utterance.

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Haroun describes him as a ‘magician’ (H 16), or ‘juggler’ (H 16), a person who can bring fantastical worlds to life. Being a storyteller is thus both powerful and magical because the very nature of naming things – speech – endows words with power. The names of the characters in the novel, therefore, are powerful in the mouth of the storyteller and the act of naming reinforces the dominance of speech and storytelling. For example, the Plentimaw fishes, who live in the Great Story Sea not only speak in rhyme, but also have mouths (maws) all over their bodies, mouths which are ‘constantly at work sucking in story streams and blowing them out again; pausing only to speak’ (H 84). The names of Princess Batcheat and Prince Bolo stand for ‘chit-chat’ and ‘speak’. The young heroine who helps Haroun is called Blabbermouth. The Land of Gup, which Haroun travels to when his adventure begins, stands for ‘gossip’, ‘nonsense’ or ‘fib’. Moreover, tellingly, Haroun’s father, the storyteller Rashid Khalifa, is known by the names ‘The Ocean of Notions’ and ‘The Shah of Blah’ and renowned for his ‘Gift of the Gab’. The use of alternate or memorable names is a feature that Rushdie is borrowing directly from ‘the repertoires of storytellers’ that are common in his native India. Sen points out: [. . .] the Indian habit of naming friends and acquaintances by kinship terms to denote favour and respectful familiarity. That is why Tagore is often referred to as Gurudev (honoured teacher), Gandhi as Mahatma (great soul) [. . .]. Thus Rashid the storyteller’s titles – the Ocean of Notions to his friends and the Shah of Blah to his enemies – are very much appropriate within the Indian context.133

Moreover, the fact that Rushdie is using two languages here – he provides a translation key of the book – also encourages children to be open to other cultures, traditions and words, which echoes his preoccupation with the migrant experience and his larger project of ‘conjoining worlds’ and building bridges between cultures. For Rushdie, despite the fatwa, it is story which can provide this. Finally, the use of memorable names is equally important in the storytelling tradition and particularly in children’s literature and in fairy tales: we only have to remember famous tales such as ‘Red Riding Hood’, or ‘Cinderella’, or ‘Tom Thumb’, which employ similar techniques. The novel’s return to a world constructed on oppositions or binary positions is yet another way in which the oral word is implicitly stressed. The oral world, as Ong describes, is ‘highly polarised and agonistic [. . .], a world of good and evil, virtue and vice, villains and heroes’,134 a world which the (oral) storyteller naturally inhabits and which is equally intuitive to children. In Haroun, these polarized worlds are evoked by various means. The sad city where the Khalifas

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live eventually becomes happy and the storyteller’s loss of storytelling abilities returns bringing with it the traditional closure of ‘a happy ending’. The two Lands that Haroun visits, the Land of Gup, which lives in perpetual light, and the Land of Chup, which lives in perpetual darkness, are the lands of gossip and quiet. We see heroes (Haroun, Rashid and all the characters and armies from the land of Gup) fighting enemies: ‘a war between Love (of the Ocean, or the Princess) and Death’ (H 125). Khattam-Shud’s army comprises Shadow Warriors whose eyes ‘instead of whites [. . .] had blacks’ and whose ‘irises were grey as twilight and the pupils were white as milk’ (H 125). Moreover, Khattam-Shud himself, as ‘the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech’ and ‘the Arch-Enemy of all stories, even of Language himself ’ (H 79), is set against the novel’s persistent call for speech. Highlighting these opposites may seem a little simplistic, but sits in line with the construction of traditional stories for children, which follow simple formula. Moreover, it serves to reinforce the didactic element that not only charactersizes children’s literature, but which Haroun also arguably employs. Whether the child is being read to, or is reading the story alone, the polarizing of the above ideas urges both the child and the parent to take a stance and decide on a position. The figure of Kattham-Shud can take on more than a symbolic meaning: the end of the story, the end of storytelling, the death of Rushdie. Oral storytelling practices and the oral world are reflected in the novel through personification: in the transformation of the material book into ‘living’ and ‘speaking’ characters. General Kitab (whose name means book) is in charge of the Army or ‘Library’ of Chup, whose ‘Pages are organised into Chapters and Volumes. Each Volume is headed by a Front, or Title Page’ (H 88). As Ong reminds us texts assimilate utterance to the human body. They introduce a feeling for ‘headings’ in accumulations of knowledge [. . .] Pages not only have ‘heads’ but also ‘feet’ for footnotes. References are given to what is ‘above’ and ‘below’ in a text when what is meant is several pages back or further on [. . .]. All this is quite a different world of order from anything in the oral sensibility, which has no way of operating with ‘headings’ or verbal linearity.135

This transformation of the material book into people or characters has the effect of making it come alive in the sense that it ‘talks’ to us, as if it issues from the mouth of a storyteller, as speech. It also makes literal the idea that words can jump from the page and come alive – in this case, can somehow become embodied. As Ivan Kreilkamp has also noted, the evocation of a storyteller represents embodiment, a wholeness which is lost in the art of the author-novelist and thus, the fact

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that the narrative insists on this notion, (curiously) lends to it an authenticity of voice, though not necessarily an authority (which one might attribute to the author). Rushdie’s storyteller is significantly asserting not only speech but also with it the living, breathing person from which speech and voice emanates. Another way in which books and oral storytelling practices are alluded to is through the references to The Thousand and One Nights, which Rushdie once again returns to in Haroun, a fact that echoes his own childhood experiences. The allusions to the Nights work on various levels, but primarily act as a means of aligning the story to the oral storytelling tradition and reinforcing the abundance of stories circulating in the world for the child to draw on. First, the Nights are alluded to through the use of the number one thousand and one, which mirrors the number of stories in the collection. This number is echoed throughout the text and is reflective of what Pierre Durix identifies as ‘a paradigm for beauty, perfection or abundance’.136 For example, there are ‘a thousand and one violin strings’ (H 70), ‘a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents’ (H 72), and ‘a thousand and one small islands’ on which Gup City is built (H 87). However, the number is also historically significant and brings us back to the oral world. It is noteworthy that from the eighth to thirteenth centuries ad one thousand and one simply meant ‘many’, and that it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that its meaning was used literally in the compilation of the Nights collection, when ‘it became necessary to add a great many stories in order to complete the number one thousand and one’.137 The indefiniteness of large numbers expresses a common feature attributed to oral peoples which, as Ong notes, ‘before writing was deeply interiorized by print, [. . .] did not feel themselves situated every moment of their lives in abstract computed time [. . .]. The abstract calendar number would relate to nothing in real life.’138 This also sheds light on other aspects of folk stories and fairy tales such as the frequent opening ‘once upon a time’, a formula with which Haroun opens: ‘There was once, in the country of Alfibay, a sad city, a city so ruinously sad, it had forgotten its name’ (H 15). This non-sequential, non-situated, unspecified time is a feature of oral storytelling and is opposed to the often specifically located times found in realist novels but is also common in children’s literature. The frame story of the Nights gives us another insight into the workings of Haroun which echoes the tales through the employment of the metaphor of night. Night-time is a means of entering into story and signals the entry for the child into the imagination. Haroun is transported into each magical land at night and through dream, which is where the story takes place. Indeed, the importance of the imagination in relation to stories and children is, as we saw

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in the description of Rushdie’s own childhood vital to their development. One of the reasons that children need imagination is, as Linda Fredericks notes, to help them ‘see beyond the limitations of their present circumstances’.139 Night is also symbolic of hiding and has an intimacy about it as it is often the time when parents tell their children stories. Bed-time and bath-time stories resonated on a personal level for Rushdie and his son. The Nights are also important as they act as an extra-textual metaphor. Storytelling reveals both its emancipatory and ontological capacity. For Scheherazade the storyteller, reaching the end of her story at dawn would mean the end of her life, a threat that her storytelling helped her to avoid. It is this imminent and very real threat of death, that Rushdie was also living with. Just as the story of Scheherazade is ultimately about ‘survival’ so is Rushdie’s novel, both literally and metaphorically about the survival of the storyteller Rashid-Rushdie and more widely the (potential) storyteller in each of us. Thus, at the end of the novel, we learn that Haroun’s story becomes the story we are reading: Haroun and the Sea of Stories is the story Haroun’s father tells of Haroun trying to save his father’s storytelling abilities. As Dean Flower aptly says, ‘what the story is really about is the story’.140 For Rushdie however, the writing and telling of the story of Haroun and the Sea of Stories has not managed to silence him. In the novel, it is Khattum-Shud who is defeated; he becomes what his own literal meaning: ‘completely finished’, ‘over and done with’ (H 218) and he signals, as Pierre Durix notes, the end of the story in Hindustani, he is ‘the end’.141 Khattam-Shud, ‘the end’, works on various levels: he symbolizes a release from the shadows and into the light (Rushdie was in hiding in the shadows); the end of the fairy tale; the end of Rashid’s silence and Rushdie’s; and even the threat of the very real end of his life (which he hoped would not happen) imposed by his sentence of death. In Haroun, storytelling for survival expresses itself on an individual, communal and international level. The wider implication moves into utopian discourses and finds echoes in narratives of emancipation. Here Clara Clairborne Park’s reading of Haroun resonates. Reflective of the didactic capacity found in folktales and their hidden polemic to instruct children in ethical and moral values Park, drawing on a comparison of Haroun with Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) goes so far as to see the novel as embodying an ‘explicit, expository truth, the kind of truth that is claimed not in stories but in orations, in pamphlets, in lectures and sermons’.142 For Park the novel has a political sense which ‘is profoundly, confidently ethical, in that it intends [. . .] to advance the public good’.143 If with The Satanic Verses Rushdie has failed to conjoin the two very definite cultural traditions, that of the (broadly) secular West and the Muslim

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East, then by writing a children’s story, one that does not directly discuss adult issues, or adult worlds, Rushdie finds freedom in the more symbolic, imaginary world of childhood, finds freedom through simply telling stories. Rushdie’s pleas are not directly concerned with the ‘freedom of speech’, which arguably, raises specific issues of its own,144 rather the ‘moral of the story’, the lesson he teaches, following Benjamin, is a plea for ‘freedom to tell stories’, the freedom to keep our storytellers. However, Rushdie is not simply telling ‘adults’ this story, but teaching this to our children. As Park pertinently states: ‘the purpose of Haroun and the Sea of Stories is [. . .] public [. . .] not only because it concerns freedom’, but also and precisely because ‘those who write to children . . . write for the sake of the future.’145 Marketed as a children’s story, but one that nevertheless can also be read by adults, either alone or to children, Rushdie’s message or ‘lesson’, reflective of Benjamin’s notion of counsel, reaches the whole of society.

Notes 1 Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012), 20. 2 Syed Amanuddin, ‘The Novels of Salman Rushdie: Mediated Reality as Fantasy’, World Literature Today 63.1 (1989): 43. 3 Ibid. 4 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 19. 5 To read more about oral storytelling in India from bardic times to the present day, see Anne Pellowski, The World of Storytelling (Expanded and rev. edn; Bronx: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1990), 36–7; 44–50; 77. 6 All subsequent references and in-text quotations from these novels will be abbreviated to the following: Midnight’s Children – (MC); The Satanic Verses (SV); Haroun and the Sea of Stories (H). See Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children. 1st published 1981 (London: Vintage, 1995); The Satanic Verses. 1st published 1988 (Great Britain: Vintage Press, 1998); Haroun and the Sea of Stories (London: Granta Books, 1990). 7 As I will be arguing in this chapter, this is but one of the ways in which Rushdie asserts his role as storyteller. 8 Rushdie is an extremely high profile writer, and one whose influence and fame is undoubtedly great. Although his international renown has been achieved under difficult circumstances (as a result of the fatwa issues by Iran following the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses), as Joel Kuortti says, ‘That a novelist should be world news must be regarded as an achievement form the point of view of what Rushdie’s literary approach may be seen to be, that fiction and writers of fiction are important.’ See Joel Kuortti, Fictions to Live in: Narration as an

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The Return of the Storyteller in Contemporary Fiction Argument for Fiction in Salman Rushdie’s Novels (Frankfurt and Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 16. Rushdie has explained how Midnight’s Children is modelled on oral storytelling practices: ‘One of the strange things about oral narrative – which I did look at very closely before writing Midnight’s Children – is that you find there a form which is thousands of years old, and yet which had all the methods of a modernist novel.’ Shepherd notes that Rushdie’s use of ‘modernist’ here pertains more to the notion of ‘postmodernist’. See Salman Rushdie in an interview in Adelaide 1984, quoted in Ron Shepherd, ‘Midnight’s Children: A Parody of the Indian Novel’, SPAN: Newsletter of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 21 (1985): 184–92. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, 1969 1st Shocken edn, Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 2007), 83. This focus on the modes and practices of oral storytelling and those of written literature is not the only way the storyteller can be engaged with as the following chapters will illustrate, though it does present itself in this manner in Rushdie’s, Crace and Llosa’s novels in particular, where this relationship is made explicit. I am referring to a depiction of Satan that is quoted in the epigraph to The Satanic Verses and which comes from Daniel Defoe’s The History of the Devil. I discuss this more analytically in the section on The Satanic Verses. See following section in this chapter. This notion of otherness is not a concern in the children’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a novel which also closes with ‘a happy ending’. However, here the identity of the oral storyteller serves to assert his relationship to an ‘Indian’ oral storytelling tradition and as such, to a living rather than an obsolete practice. Keith Booker. ‘“Beauty and the Beast” Dualism as Despotism in the fiction of Salman Rushdie’, ELH 57 (1990): 983. This concept ‘imaginary homelands’ is the title of Rushdie’s collection of essays of the same name and of a particular essay within the book. Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012), 19. Joel Kuortti, Fictions to Live in: Narration as an Argument for Fiction in Salman Rushdie’s Novels (Frankfurt and Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 13. Norbert Schürer, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Continuum, 2004), 20. Schürer, Midnight’s Children: A Reader’s Guide, 20–1. Although Hewson’s central thesis focuses more on the notion of the migrant rather than on an investigation of storyteller per se, the notion of the storyteller as migrant is a worthy one and does, as Hewson argues, very much inform Rushdie’s fiction. However, this becomes more evident in The Satanic Verses, and Haroun, as I will explore in the following two sections. Hewson’s paper is

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focused on an exploration of Rushdie’s status as a migrant, one that gives him an identity of being ‘at once plural and partial’ and ‘both insider and outsider in the society in which he lives and in the societies he writes about’. She posits that it is precisely this condition of being ‘in a position of otherness’ which moves migrants (such as Rushdie) ‘to reinvent themselves and find new ways to describe themselves and the world’ or, in other words, it is this which moves them to tell stories, and it is this which leads us to the storyteller. As Syed Amanuddin also usefully points out, for Rushdie, the act of migration is not construed as negative, ‘an absence’ due to the consequence of being ‘uprooted’ from one’s birthplace, rather he conceives of it instead as its opposite, ‘an overcrowding’ which is made up of ‘too many voices speaking at the same time’, voices which garrulously populate his fiction. It is this overpopulating of Rushdie’s fiction with voices, that brings to his fiction the sense of a communality of story, rather than the story of one individual teller, and as such, moves away from the traditional model of the realist novel. See Kelly Hewson, ‘Opening up the Universe a Little More: Salman Rushdie and the Migrant as Storyteller’, Span 29 (1989): 82–5; Amanuddin, Syed. ‘The Novels of Salman Rushdie: Mediated Reality as Fantasy.’ World Literature Today. 63:1 (1989) 43. Hewson, Span, 88. Amanuddin, World Literature Today, 45. Michael Reder, Conversations with Salman Rushdie (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2000), 59. Ibid., 37. Hewson, Span, 89. Nancy Batty, ‘The Art of Suspense: Rushdie’s 1001 (Mid-)Nights’, Ariel 18.3 (1987): 54. Batty, Ariel, 49–50. Pier Paolo Piciucco, ‘The (hi)story of Padma’s 1001 Different Faces’, in Rajeshwar Mittapalli and Joel Kuortti (eds), Salman Rushdie: New Critical Insights (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2003), 122. I return to this notion of reading aloud in the section below on Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Luis de Juan Hatchard, ‘Refunctionalising the Past: Salman Rushdie’s Re-Writing of the Eighteenth-century Novelistic Conventions in Midnight’s Children’, Miscelanea (Journal of English and American Studies, University of Zaragoza), 13 (1992): 51. Ibid., 52. Ibid. Keith M. Booker, ‘Beauty and the Beast: Dualism as Despotism in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie’, ELH 57 (1990): 983.

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34 Ibid. 35 Indira Karmacheti, ‘Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and an Alternate Genesis’, Pacific Coast Philology 21.1–2 (November 1986), 82. 36 Hayden White gives a definition that moves us to better differentiate historical stories from imaginary stories. He states ‘Where the aim in view is the telling of a story, the problem of narrativity turns on the issue of whether historical events can be truthfully represented as manifesting the structures and processes of events met with more commonly in certain kinds of ‘imaginative’ discourses, that is, fictions as the epic, the folktale, myth, romance, tragedy, comedy, farce and the like. This means what distinguishes ‘historical’ from ‘fictional’ stories is first and foremost their content (my emphasis), rather than their form. The content of historical stories is real events, events that actually happened, rather than imaginary events, invented by the narrator. This implies that the form in which historical events present themselves to a prospective narrator is found rather than ‘constructed’. However, although White’s focus here on content might be to some extent justifiable, it does not necessarily follow that all events in fictional texts such as novels are exclusively ‘imaginary’. If we view this through the prism of the storyteller, we might remember that stories are constructed not simply out of a vaccum where imagination bares no relation to reality, but that the storyteller as a fashioner of the ‘experience’ of others and selector of versions of history, has a foot in both camps. See Hayden White, The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, London: John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 27. 37 Rushdie obtained a BA in History from Cambridge University. 38 Michael Reder, Conversations with Salman Rushdie (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2000), 69. 39 Ibid. 40 David Lipscomb includes an Appendix at the back of his chapter, in which he shows parallel passages from Stanley Wolpert’s A New History of India and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. See David Lipscomb, ‘Caught in a Strange Middle Ground: Contesting History in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’, Diaspora 1.2 (Fall 1991): 163–89. 41 Ibid., 179. 42 Ibid. 43 Benjamin also draws attention to this relationship between the storyteller and the historian or chronicler. See Benjamin, Illuminations, 95. 44 Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (Bombay, Calcutta, Madras: Oxford University Press Delhi, 1994), 7–9. 45 Ibid., 10. 46 Ibid., 40. 47 Ibid.

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48 Specifically using M. M. Kaye’s The Far Pavillions as an example (among others), Rushdie damns the book on the basis of its form, which, he notes, although depicts an unsympathetic treatment of individual British characters, sees Indians with only ‘walk-on’ parts, making them ‘bit-players in their own history’. By allowing the Britons the claim to full fictional territory, ‘the form insists that they are the ones whose stories matter’. See Salman Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, Imaginary Homelands, 126. 49 Midnight’s Children was also awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, an Arts Council Writer’s Award and the English Speaking Union Award and in 1993 it was judged to be ‘the Booker of Bookers’, the best novel judged to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in its 25-year history. 50 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 171. 51 Rushdie states: ‘At the centre of the storm stands a novel, a work of fiction, one that aspires to the condition of literature. It has often seemed to me that people on all sides of the argument have lost sight of this simple fact. The Satanic Verses has been described, and treated, as a work of bad history, as an anti-religious pamphlet, as the product of an international capitalist-Jewish conspiracy, as an act of murder (‘he has murdered our hearts’), as the product of a person comparable to Hitler or Attila the Hun. It felt impossible, amidst such a hubbub to insist on the fictionality of fiction.’ See Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 393. 52 Rushdie did in fact waiver at one point, when he signed a letter reaffirming his faith in Islam, which he later retracted, admitting that he had done this purely based on fear. 53 Kuortti, Fictions to Live in, 16. 54 For an erudite discussion of the terms translatability, and untranslatability particularly in relation to comparative literature, see Emily Apter, The Translation Zone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 55 Joseph Anton is a combination of the names of two writers: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. Rushdie says: ‘He had spent his life naming fictional characters. Now by naming himself he had turned himself into a sort of fictional character as well. [. . .] Conrad, the trans-lingual creator of wanderers, lost and not lost, of voyagers into the heart of darkness [. . .] and Chekhov, the master of loneliness and melancholy, of the beauty of an old world destroyed, like the trees in the cherry orchard, by the brutality of the new; Chekhov, whose three sisters believed that real life was elsewhere and yearned eternally for a Moscow to which they could not return: these were his godfather’s now.’ See Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 165. 56 The impetus behind The Satanic Verses and its conceptual framework is important to note, not because Rushdie’s explanation has more ‘authority’ on the novel’s subsequent interpretation(s) and/or reception, but precisely because it maps the development of his ideas which in turn, shed light onto our conception of him as a storyteller, and onto his engagement with the storyteller and storytelling.

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70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77

The Return of the Storyteller in Contemporary Fiction Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 68. Ibid., 68–9. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 72. Ibid. Ibid. Peter Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption: Iblīs in Sufi Psychology (Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1983), 18. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 26. The full quotation is: ‘The Encyclopedia of Islam informs us that ‘Al-Shaitan is a spirit that not necessarily evil. [. . .] The notion of a shaitan as “Satan” is borrowed from Judaism. The Arabic word shaitan can be used in the sense of “genius”, much as in its original sense of inspiration by a spirit. “Belonging to the same order of ideas,” the Encylcopedia adds, “is the belief that a poet was possessed by a shaitan who inspired his words.” In this generic and morally neutral usage, all human poetry is satanic verse. In the playing on the synecdoche between Satan and all inspirational spirits, The Satanic Verses asks us to reflect on the transmission of fictions both sacred and profane.’ See Marlena G. Corcoran, ‘Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Narration’, The Iowa Review 20.1 (1990): 159. Rushdie gives an account of the origins of the satanic verses. He says: The story of the ‘satanic verses’ can be found, among other places, in the canonical writings of the classical writer al-Tabari. He tells us that on one occasion the Prophet was given verses which seemed to accept the divinity of the three most popular pagan goddesses of Mecca, thus compromising Islam’s rigid monotheism. Later he rejected those verses as being a trick of the devil – saying that Satan had appeared to him in the guise of the Archangel Gabriel and spoken ‘satanic verses’. See Salman Rushdie, Step across this Line: Collected Non-fiction 1992–2002 (London: Random House, 2002), 230. This quote is taken from Daniel Defoe’s, A History of the Devil, as is indicated directly below the quote. See Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 1. Martine Hennard Dutheil, ‘The Epigraph to the Satanic Verses: Defoe’s Devil and Rushdie’s Migrant’, Southern Review 30.1 (1997): 51. Ibid., 53. Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 73. Dutheil, Southern Review, 61. Ibid., 53. Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 5.

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78 Although Rushdie’s predicament is not the same as that of a refugee, it converges in some ways with the refugee experience in the sense of what Jackson describes as ‘flight (event) and fear’ (experience). Moreover, in describing the refugee, Jackson notes: ‘Words such as displaced, dislocated, fugitive, uprooted and stateless describe the refugees objective situation, but they describe with equal metaphoric force his or her state of mind.’ See Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling: Violence Transgression and Intersubjectivity (Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006), 89. 79 Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling, 105. 80 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 7. 81 Ibid. 82 During this period Rushdie wrote Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a short-story collection East West and the novel The Moor’s Last Sigh. 83 Nico Israel, Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 176. 84 Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling, 105. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid. 87 Rushdie describes how he had re-discovered a short story he had written, which was based on the reading of the Travels of Ibn Battuta, ‘a fourteenth-century Moroccan scholar with itchy feet’, which was written as an imaginary fragment of the lost pages of Battuta’s book. It is in this story, which he called ‘The Princess Khamosh’ we find the original conception of Haroun’s two tribes ‘the Guppees, a chatterbox people, and the Chupwalas, among whom a cult of silence has grown up, and who worship a stone deity called Bezaban, that is, without a tongue.’ See Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 168. 88 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 168. 89 Ibid. 90 Gerald Marzorati, ‘Rushdie in Hiding’, The New York Times Magazine, 4 November 1990. 91 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 167. 92 Rosalía Baena, ‘Telling a Bath-time Story: Haroun and the Sea of Stories as a Modern Literary Fairy Tale’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 36.2 (2001): 67. 93 Andrew S. Teverson, ‘Fairy-tale Politics: Free Speech and Multiculturalism in “Haroun and the Sea of Stories”’, Twentieth Century Literature 47.4 (Winter 2001): 444–66. 94 Ibid., 447. 95 As I mentioned this situation mirrors real life for Rushdie at the time. He was a storyteller who, by telling stories that ‘weren’t true’, lost not only the ability to tell stories, but also, poignantly, the ability to be with his son. 96 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 166.

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97 As Anne Pellowski explains, therapeutic storytelling ‘is used to assist in healing or curing a person diagnosed as sick [. . .]’. The illness may be mental, emotional or physical, or a combination thereof. See Pellowski, The World of Storytelling, 115. 98 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 166–7. 99 Baena, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 65. 100 Maria Nikolajeva, ‘Exit Children’s Literature?’ The Lion and the Unicorn 22.2 (1998): 233. 101 Perry Nodelman lists several features which he says characterize children’s literature: ‘simple but not necessarily simplistic; action-orientated rather than character-orientated; presented from the viewpoint of innocence; optimisitic with happy endings; didactic; repetitious in diction and structure.’ See Perry Nodelman, The Pleasures of Children’s Literature. 1992. 2nd edn (New York: Longman, 1996), 190. 102 Nikolajeva, The Lion and the Unicorn, 222. 103 Baena, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 65. 104 I will be returning to this concept later in the discussion. 105 Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 18. 106 Baena, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 65. 107 Clara Clairborne Park, ‘Horse and Sea-horse: Areopagitica and the Sea of Stories’, Hudson Review: Magazine Literature of AAS (New York) 46.3 (1993): 453. 108 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 166. 109 Baena, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 67. 110 Ibid. 111 As I mentioned above, Rushdie was in hiding at the time. The novel opens with a dedication ‘for Zafar’ (Rushdie’s son). 112 Benjamin, Illuminations, 102. 113 Pellowski, The World of Storytelling, 71. 114 Ibid., 68. 115 Ibid. 116 Barre Toelken, ‘“The Pretty Languages” of Yellowman: Genre, Mode and Texture in Navajo Coyote Narratives’, in Dan Ben-Amos (ed.), Folkore Genres. (Austin: University of Texas, 1976), 93–123. Qtd. in Pellowski, The World of Storytelling, 68. 117 Pierre Durix, ‘The Gardener of Stories’ Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 28.1 (1993): 118–19. 118 Ibid., 114. 119 Ibid. 120 Ellin Greene, Storytelling: Art and Technique. 3rd edn (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996), 46. 121 Ibid., xviii.

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122 Anne Trousdale, ‘Interactive Storytelling: Scaffolding Children’s Early Narratives’, Langauge Arts 67.2 (February 1990): 164. 123 Ibid., 165. 124 Ibid., 166. 125 Elizabeth Nesbitt, ‘Hold to That Which is Good’, The Horn Book Magazine 16 (January–February, 1940): 14. Qtd in Greene, Storytelling Art and Technique, 34. 126 Greene, Storytelling Art and Technique, 30. 127 Sen gives examples of expressions which she observes are ‘almost literal translations of Hindi or Urdu syntax’ and shows how word repetition is a very real feature of Indian-English speech patterns and is often used ‘to express degrees of intensity, or plurality and other adjective functions’. See Suchismita Sen, ‘Memory, Language, and Society in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories’, Contemporary Literature 36.4 (1995): 664–5. 128 Ibid., 669–70. 129 Ibid. 130 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 34. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid., 32–3. 133 Sen, Contemporary Literature, 668. 134 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 45. 135 Ibid., 100. 136 Durix, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 121. 137 David Pinault, Story-telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), 7. 138 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 97. 139 Linda Fredericks, ‘Storytelling and Resiliency: Why Children Need Stories’, in Alison M. Cox and David H. Albert (eds), The Healing Heart for Families: Storytelling to Encourage Caring and Healthy Families (Garbiola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2003), 127. 140 Dean Flower, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’, The Hudson Review 44.2 (Summer 1991): 319. 141 Pierre Durix notes that the word is also the ‘Hindustani word uttered by story-tellers to announce the end of their narration’. See Durix, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 116. 142 Park, Hudson Review, 465. 143 Ibid., 463. 144 I am referring here to a discussion which Andrew Teverson summarizes in his paper on Haroun. See Teverson, Twentieth Century Literature, 451–2. 145 Park, Hudson Review, 465.

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6

(Postmodern) Story/reteller: John Barth’s The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation. It is the Muse-derived element of the epic art in a broader sense and encompasses its varieties. In the first place among these is the one practiced by the storyteller. It starts the web which all stories together form in the end. One ties on to the next, as the great storytellers, particularly the Oriental ones, have always readily shown. In each of them there is a Scheherazade who thinks of a fresh story whenever her tale comes to a stop. Benjamin, Illuminations, 98 The focus of this chapter stems from the idea of re-telling, which becomes particularly poignant when reading the fiction of John Barth, whose conviction to re-tell and thus ‘replenish’1 literature is fired by one of the most infamous fictional storytellers, Scheherazade of The Thousand and One Nights. Indeed, Barth makes no secret about his ‘love affair’ with Scheherazade but constantly reinforces it, deeming her image ‘the aptest, sweetest, hauntingest, hopefullest [. . .] I know for the storyteller.’2 Barth has even accepted prizes on behalf of this fictional storyteller and has admitted to keeping quotations and notes from the Nights on his writing desk to give him inspiration.3 In fact, he has openly stated that he models himself on Scheherazade to such an extent that he sees himself as a storyteller: ‘By trade I am a storyteller; I’ll begin by telling a story. Once upon a time, in a land close at hand, there lived a storyteller [. . .].’4 However, as well as identifying himself with the storyteller, Barth also significantly situates himself in the academy – ‘in those days the teller of this story was a full-time professor as well as a full-time storyteller and the protagonist of this particular story’5 – a position which grants him an ‘authority’ and lends a

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particular self-consciousness to his appropriation of the storyteller and the way the figure is employed in his fiction. This authority is important, as it acts as a voice of influence in the climate within which Barth operates, mid-twentieth century, post-war America (and beyond). As one of the pioneer American postmodernists, described by Malcolm Bradbury as ‘the postmodernist as pure storyteller’,6 it is interesting to view this return to the storyteller in the light of Barth’s legacy to an emergent (American) postmodernism, particularly as it was first experienced as ‘a breakthrough in fiction’,7 a fact that lends insight into its relationship to the (contentious) line between it and its ‘anterior’ modernism. For Barth, the storyteller, storytelling and the story cycle as exemplified by the Nights, serve as the means of instigating change and a new direction in the (American) novel from the 1960s onwards. The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991)8 is a novel that is inextricably linked to the figure of the storyteller. Although not as critically acclaimed as some of Barth’s earlier novels such as Chimera (1972), it best reflects a project which began with what Stephen Benson describes as ‘Barth’s return to premodern narratives’ whereby The model of the folkloric story cycle – the proliferation of serial frames and embedded tales as a literary enactment of oral storytelling – becomes the source both of thematic material and of a conception of narrative as a malleable space within which newly written interventions in traditional tales act as a mode of replenishment.9

Set between the worlds of medieval Baghdad and twentieth-century America, the novel sets up a storytelling competition between an anonymous storyteller called ‘Somebody’ and the original Sindbad of the Nights. Barth merges two storytelling traditions, oral and written, and two different cultures and historical periods, exploring ‘the interrelated themes of orality, replenishment, tradition and intervention’.10 Somebody is a ‘Sailor’ who recounts his voyages from Maryland, twentieth-century America, which tell of the life of a character called Simon Behler, beginning with his childhood through adolescence to adulthood. His narratives, narrated in a ‘realist’ mode to an audience of listeners in Sindbad’s court, place the Bildungsroman in the orally told repertoire of a storyteller giving an oral storytelling performance. Barth creates both an intra-dialogical space between storytellers and their respective listening audience in the novel, as well as fostering the extradialogic space outside the novel which interacts with both popular and critical readership. This aim, as I explicate below, is linked directly to Barth’s conception

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of postmodernist fiction, one which sees the storyteller at the centre. For the medieval audience listening to Somebody’s twentieth-century stories, stories that are based primarily on realist, and written narrative texts, Somebody’s voyages are as ‘exotic’ as Sindbad’s appear to be to the extra-textual audience that contemporary readers of the novel represent. However, although Somebody’s story begins in a realistic mode, representative of the conventions of ‘novelistic realism’, as his narrative progresses, and he becomes more and more a part of the fantasy world of medieval Baghdad, he is transformed into a medieval and oral storyteller, and his new-found skills lead him to finally win the competition. As the reader reflects on the transitions between realism and fantasy, between novelist and storyteller, (s)he is led to identify with the audience listening to the tales to the point that (s)he joins it. Last Voyage is intricately concerned with the notion of storyteller in relation to identity, in the discovery – significantly through the very act of storytelling – of who the storyteller is. The narratives are all concerned with different ‘versions’ of Somebody’s former selves, which Somebody retells from a written transcription in order to discover his own identity. However, the telling of his story reveals that this identity is shifting, never constant and ultimately elusive. The only constant is his position as storyteller: it is through storytelling that he discovers ‘the meaning of (his) life’ and also of narrative life and as such, the novel displays both existential and ontological concerns. Another key aspect foregrounded in the novel, which is linked both to the figure of the storyteller as well as to Barth’s conception of postmodernist fiction, is the frame narrative. The novel displays a purposeful and complex web of narrative embedding, stories-within-stories, which mirror the construction of the Nights. The novel consequently opens with what we later understand to be the frame narrative, whose narrator (our ‘primary’ storyteller) we find lying in a hospital bed, waiting for ‘death’ to take him away. Barth’s storyteller-narrator is neither maimed like Crace’s storyteller in The Gift of Stones, wounded like Philoctetes, or awaiting an impending execution, like Scheherazade. However, significantly, he shares with these storytellers, a proximity to death and the implicit and ‘wisdom’ that comes from this experience. The fact that he begins his telling near the end point of his life, calls to mind Benjamin’s notion that ‘death is the sanction of everything the storyteller can tell’.11 But death is avoided by the telling of the story of Somebody who, in turn, tells the story of Simon. It is in this sense that Barth models his novel on the Nights, beginning with a frame story that echoes Scheherazade’s and whose narrative project is to keep telling in order to stay alive. As is true of the Nights, death here equates to

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narrative death and it is the storyteller, through the very act of storytelling, that manages to cheat death of its inevitable ‘end’, and instead becomes a creative and (re)generative act through its creation of narrative life. The novel, therefore, moves away from its conventional expectations of depicting ‘a life’, and instead focuses on telling of different lives, lives which are brought to us by various narrators. As a result, Somebody and Sindbad are not the only storytellers in the novel. There are four fictional storytellers in Last Voyage: the storyteller-narrator of the frame, Somebody alias Simon Behler, Sindbad, and Scheherazade herself. Each of the storytellers’ narratives reflects the theme of storytelling for survival: the end of their story will mean the end of their own fictional existence, a (narrative) death that they each vehemently seek to avoid. Conversely, the telling of their individual stories and each instance of their narrative appearance leads to narrative existence, and thus to ‘life’. The creation of a story and a storyteller is thus revealed as a creation of worlds, explicating Barth’s statement that: ‘The storyteller’s trade is the manufacture of universes.’12 In this way, Barth embeds in the figure of the quintessential storyteller Scheherazade not only the power of the frame tale and of re-telling, but alsothe relation between death, survival and narrative.

Situating the postmodernist storyteller (alias John Barth) John Vickery’s pronouncement that ‘it is no great secret to any attentive student of John Barth’s career that he is dedicated to narrativity, to the telling and retelling of stories’13 is, frankly, an understatement. Since the publication of his first book, The Floating Opera in 1956, Barth has not stopped or slowed down his ‘telling’, continuing right up to the present day.14 In terms of his career, Barth has been more than successful; his acceptance of no less than 12 literary awards is but one of the markers which point to his influence on American writing being significant.15 Indeed, the fact that Barth describes himself as the ‘so-andso, digressive postmodernist author of The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor and other fictions’16 (my emphasis) is telling: for Barth, the practice of novel writing is very much a self-conscious (though playful) act. Indeed, as we shall see, it is precisely Barth’s self-conscious appropriation of the storyteller and oral storytelling practices – which are predominantly derived from the narrative cycle of the Nights tales – that are intricately linked to Barth’s conception of and practice of postmodernist literature. Barth is regarded as one of the earliest and most significant writers of early American postmodernist fiction and as such, is a crucial figure in assembling the

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so-called postmodern in literature. Much like his overseas contemporary Italo Calvino, to whom he felt an affinity17 and whose impetus for writing began with an interest in folktales, Barth’s similarly stemmed from looking more closely at oral storytelling traditions, story cycles and oral storytelling performances. Associated initially with the sense of the belatedness of postmodernism, and seeing it as a written ‘literature of exhaustion’, Barth sought to ‘replenish’18 (Western) literature through the idea of re-telling stories. In his early and influential essay, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ (1967), Barth draws on the example set by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges to illustrate what he saw as a new direction in literature, which moved away from notions of originality associated with the author, and instead towards a conception of the writer as storyteller whose project was to re-tell, reinterpret and replenish literature by using pre-existing archetypes or stories. He says: ‘For (Borges) no one has claim to originality in literature; all writers are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of pre-existing archetypes.’19 This move away from the concept of ‘originality’ is significant in relation to his emergent sense of the postmodern in literature as is, equally, his label ‘storyteller’ to describe himself as a writer. It is not that Barth completely disregards the notion of originality, but that he moreso recognizes that there is no such thing as complete originality: there are always ‘percursors’20 and that the notion of tradition is larger than the (written) literary Canon, encompassing instead a fluidity that characterizes the oral tradition of the storyteller. In ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ the notion of the postmodernist text as an avant-garde literary type is first exemplified. Here, two of Barth’s key preoccupations, narrative embedding and the oral tale, specifically derived from the tradition of the Nights find their beginnings. Barth admits that ‘among my ambitions in his early novel The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) was to perpetrate a novel so thick that its title could be printed horizontally on the spine’,21 an ambition which was more to do with a notion of cheating the novel of its ‘end’ and forever continuing the story, than an ambition to simply write a long book. A few lines later we find evidence of his initial interest in oral storytelling. He explains that he was ‘interested also in exploring the oral narrative tradition from which printed fiction evolved’, and more specifically, the ‘live narrative’ that saw fiction ‘as a performing art’.22 Interestingly, both these impulses, to write a book without an end, and to explore the role of the oral storyteller as a live performer, synthesized in Barth’s (re)discovery of the story cycle of the Nights, a discovery which was, in part, rekindled by Borges. Barth noticed that ‘one of Borges’s more frequent literary allusions is to the 602nd night in the 1001 Nights, when owing to a copyist’s error, Scheherazade begins to tell the King the story of the 1001

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Nights from the beginning’,23 an error, which had it not been noticed by the king would have meant that, perhaps the six-hundred and third night might never have existed. This succinct though clever story of the copyists’ error serves, in fact, to insert Borges’s tale into the frame of the Nights, a narrative trick which Barth went on to replicate in various ways in his fiction, with Last Voyage being a prime example. Barth’s fascination with the Nights and the infamous fictional storyteller Scheherazade from this point on begins to take flight and soon enough becomes all-encompassing, serving as narrative inspiration for much of Barth’s subsequent fictional oeuvre. ‘Scheherazades’, allusions and references to the Nights inform both his fiction and non-fiction to the point that he sees her as his ‘muse’.24 He notes: (Scheherazade) remains my favorite teller, and it is a heady paradox that this persistence, being the figure of her literal aim, thereby generates itself, and becomes the emblem as well of my figurative aspiration. When I think of my condition and my hope, musewise, in the time between now and when I shall run out of ink or otherwise expire, it is Scheherazade who comes to mind, for many reasons – not least of which is a technical interest in the ancient device of the framing-story, used more beautifully in the Nights that anywhere else I know.25

Two of his novels, Chimera (1972) and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991) feature Scheherazade who appears as both a character in the novels, but also acts as narrative inspiration for a series of embedded stories which reflect Barth’s preoccupation with narrative (re)generation. Indeed, the influence of Scheherazade and the Nights has been so pervasive that Stephen Benson has subsequently dubbed him ‘The Author of the Arabian Nights’,26 a label, which does not simply point to an overzealousness on the part of Barth with the Nights and their storyteller, but actually describes the literal project of a large number of his novels (and possibly all), with influences being traced from Lost in the Funhouse (1968) onwards. Indeed, as Lahsen Benaziza correctly identifies, Barth’s fictional storyteller-muse is more than just a self-contained subject within one of his novels. For Barth, storytelling (or fiction writing) is the subject of his fictions and in this sense, it is always meta and reflective. Moreover, as storytelling is always about storytelling and as stories are about our ‘lives’, storytelling is thus ultimately linked to existence. Significantly, it is the formal structure of the story cycle of the Nights and Scheherazade as a medium for narrative regeneration, ‘which provide Barth

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with the narrative tools which both reflect these ideas and within which these ideas are realized in his fiction.’ As Stephen Benson notes, Barth’s fictions return repeatedly to the story cycle and the frame tale, both as a means of narrative organization – the structure most suited to the proliferation of stories – and as that structure which can best enact narrative multiplicity as a thematic concern. And it is the Arabian Nights, into the textual space of which Barth has written so much of his own fiction, that would appear to encapsulate, for Barth, the confluence of narration as formal device as well as moral imperative.27

Consequently, it is from this impulse that the constant regeneration of stories, which we can trace throughout his fictional oeuvre, is enacted. Indeed, as Barth’s texts move backwards and forwards between themselves and are involved in what Susan Poznar suggests are ‘countless repetitions and replenishments’,28 it becomes testing to simply read one – and stay there. Soon enough the reader may find themselves trying to chase any one of the various thematic threads throughout the corpus of his fiction. This focus on repetition and replenishment, which forces the (often critical) reader to follow the threads of his fiction is in fact a very deliberate mirroring of the Nights themselves, which present themselves as a series of interlinked stories around one fictional frame. Here are just a few of the titles which exemplify this, bearing in mind, this is even before we enter into a close reading of any of them: Once upon a Time (1994); On with the Story (1996); Coming Soon!!! (2001); The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004). What becomes slowly apparent, as Charles Ernst suggests, is that Barth’s novels are linked in a way that was ‘less intertextual than intratextual’ a fact that has led Ernst to coin this phenomenon as Barth’s ‘life-text’.29 This sense of intratextual can be understood both in terms of the way in which Barth’s novels refer to each other and also in the sense that the texts actually represent ‘life’ and thus these concepts are ultimately conjoined. The ideas about the new direction in literature, which Barth first sets out in his earlier essay ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, are returned to with more clarity in ‘The Literature of Replenishment’ (1980)30 an essay in which he more clearly formulates what constitutes ‘postmodernist’ fiction. He says: A worthy program for postmodernist fiction, I believe, is the synthesis or transcension of the antitheses of modernism, which may be summed up as premodernist and modernist modes of writing. My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth century modernist grandparents. [. . .] the ideal postmodernist novel with somehow rise

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above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and ‘contentism’, pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction.31

For Barth, postmodernist fiction lay in the project of synthesizing two impulses, or narrative modes which would lead he hoped to a ‘fiction more democratic in its appeal’.32 His vision resonates more with the idea of the creation of a simple formula for postmodernist fiction had as its main aim simple enjoyment without the need for formal instruction, a formula which readers, and not just professors of literature, would understand and it was this that he set against its predecessor, ‘high modernism’. To explicate this ‘new’ direction in fiction, Barth draws examples of other postmodernist writers who display these tendencies. He selects the Italian author, Calvino, who he describes as ‘a true postmodernist’ for having ‘one foot in [. . .] the Parisian structuralist present; one foot in fantasy’33 and the Columbian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez who he calls ‘an exemplary postmodernist and master of the storyteller’s art’,34 quoting the opening of his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) as an example of type. It is this openness and democratic form that perhaps drew Barth to the storyteller, as modelled on Scheherazade, and to the oral storytelling tradition as exemplified by the Nights. Barth likes that the storyteller, through the re-telling of stories, can also tap into communal truths, ‘folk’ reality and a sense of ‘entertainment’ that comes with the oral storytelling performance, rather than the reality solely informed by the ‘solitary’, ‘individual’ life, and the self-reflexive modes of realist fiction. Barth’s initial formulation for postmodernist fiction is later echoed by literary critics, not so much in relation to the storyteller, but in this return to old forms and to the conceptions of exhaustion and replenishment. For example, in his book Postmodernist Fiction (1987) McHale formulates the following distinction between modernist and postmodernist, a formulation, which for many became seminal in the conception of postmodernist fiction within literary academic criticism. He states that when a genre has exhausted its possibilities, it renovates or replenishes itself by shuffling the hierarchy of its features, subordinating the features that had formerly been dominant, and promoting formerly subordinate features to positions of dominance. The language of exhaustion and replenishment is of course John Barth’s, but the model of change of dominant is ultimately Roman Jakobson’s. In my view, the modernist novel’s radical exploration of epistemology was in the process of exhausting itself in the middle decades of the twentieth century [. . .] what emerged from modernism’s mid-century impasse was a different set of priorities for fiction [. . .] this new mode privileged questions of world-making

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and modes of being over questions of perception and knowing: it was ontological in its orientation, where modernism had been epistemological.’35

Barth’s work, as I reveal in my subsequent reading of his novel Last Voyage, very much exemplifies McHale’s description and as such, it serves as a useful starting point into understanding the impetus behind postmodernist fiction (at least in America) and its relation to modernism. However, more significantly perhaps, it is this very impetus which equally helps us to see how a return to the storyteller in postmodernist fiction becomes plausible. The storyteller, as the archetypal figure, the originator of stories, becomes the symbol of narrative regeneration, a symbol which Barth wholeheartedly embraces.36 This said, I do not mean to suggest that the storyteller is particular to all postmodernist fiction, if not simply because the classification is still, in many ways, problematic. Indeed, although academic criticism has, in recent years, grown tired of discussing ‘postmodernism’, this does not mean that the conception of ‘postmodernist’ fiction or the impetus behind the changes in the direction that fiction took in the 1950s is any less important to consider. In fact, arguably, years of subsequent critical reflection have provided us with the space to reflect and reconsider these distinctions and we are now beginning to understand that it is important to situate Barth’s (and more broadly American) postmodernist fiction, within the larger frame of ‘global’ literatures and ‘postmodernisms’ which neither operate in the same way in different contexts, nor emerge at the same time; nor are they necessarily perceived as antecedent to a particular conception of modernism, one which similarly is unstable.37 In a recent essay, McHale himself recognizes this and, returning to his earlier work reconceptualizes the framework he set out in his 1987 book Postmodernist Fiction (quoted earlier). McHale approaches postmodernism with a newly acquired awareness (the result of time and perspective) identifying what he calls a ‘western-centrism’ or ‘UScentrism’ in his former conception of postmodernist fiction, and warns against its employment as an umbrella term to encompass a wide variety of literatures. McHale identifies (in hindsight) a scepticism about the transnational scope of postmodernism, identifying that, despite Barth’s affinities with some of these writers, ‘writers like Beckett, Robbe-Grillet and Calvino, came to postmodernist fiction by a different route to the North Americans’38 and that the assimilation of Western European writers, magic realists like Garcia Marquez, for example, was misguided and ‘required a certain tone-deafness to cultural and historical difference’.39 His revisions to the conceptualization of postmodernist fiction are, therefore, important to note, and useful to remember in relation to the employment of the storyteller in the readings of the novelists in this book, many of whose novels have been also canopied under the global umbrella term.

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My reading of Barth in this chapter, therefore, takes its impetus from McHale’s revised conception of postmodernist fiction (which is applicable to most readings in this book), in that in situating the storyteller as a preoccupation of contemporary writers, one must also remember that the employment and return to such a figure is not necessarily simply a product of ‘postmodernism’. I read Barth in order to map the influence he exerted on the beginnings of a kind of ‘postmodernist’ fiction (which although may have been influential outside America, was very much situated in American postmodernism of the 1960s) and to document how it relates to the storyteller figure and to the relationship between oral and written traditions which are recurring concerns in the writers in this book. However, I am not situating all writers in this understanding of postmodernism, nor saying the return to the storyteller comes from a necessarily ‘postmodernist’ impulse as it does with Barth. Barth’s use of the Nights, for example which takes its impetus from the ‘productive possibilities of narrative’,40 is very different from Rushdie’s which I highlighted in the previous chapter and which, as Benson correctly identifies, represents the ‘precolonial traditions of storytelling, the fluidity of which offer an ongoing challenge to, and means of critique of, political and cultural orthodoxy.’41 I read Last Voyage, with the understanding that there are aspects within Barth’s return to the storyteller and his specific employment of this figure in his fiction which are ‘unique’ to Barth’s own fictional oeuvre, and to his specific cultural and historical context. However, I also read the novel as paradmigatic of the impulse behind Barth’s own conception of postmodernist literature (be it an ‘American’ postmodernism), a conception which through his books was both significant and influential, and one which sees the storyteller at the centre.

Framing the story: Entering the realm of narrative-(wo)men Last Voyage, much like its mimicked predecessor, the Nights, employs the structure of a frame narrative, one which allows for the insertion of a (potentially infinite) number of stories within stories in the outer frame. The employment of a frame narrative, which is noteworthy for Barth as I mentioned earlier, is one of the central drivers of narrative (re)generation in his novel. As Barth himself notes: [. . .] the phenomenon of framed tales – that is, of stories within stories which always to some degree imply stories about stories and even stories about storytelling – [. . .] is ancient, ubiquitous, and persistent; almost as old and various [. . .] as the narrative impulse itself.42

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From the outset, the reader is introduced to the novel’s three major themes which mirror the key themes in the frame story of the Nights: time, death and storytelling. As already mentioned, Last Voyage opens in a hospital in the twentieth century, and moves on to two other fictional frames: Medieval Baghdad and twentieth-century Maryland. These frames work like the proverbial onion, and move inwards and outwards until the end of the novel, where we return to the hospital and to the outer frame. Unlike the frame-tale narrator of the Nights, however, the frame-tale narrator of Last Voyage remains anonymous; all we glean is that he is a hospitalized, middle-aged man who is lying in wait of death or ‘The Familiar Stranger’, a title which marks the first and final chapter of the novel, within which the embedded narratives of the novel are contained. The reader’s first preoccupation, then, is to discover his identity and why he is telling his story; however, it is the fact we are told he is a ‘storyteller’ (LVSS 4) that holds the key to understanding both his story(telling) and the novel itself. The novel significantly begins with an end that is also a beginning and ends with an end that points back to beginnings, a fact that is reflective of the cyclical tripartite structure of human life: birth, death and regeneration. Much like the frame story of the eponymous narrator Scheherazade of the Nights, Last Voyage begins with this notion of impeding death, of finality: the narrator is telling his listener the last story before he dies. Indeed, the ‘last story’ is a recurring trope in the novel and is relevant to all the narrators in the novel as well as featuring in the title of the novel itself. But death here, along with the characters in the frame story, is not literal but figurative: death signals the end of the story, the inability to story-tell and the end of (narrative) life. What is significant – and it is this factor which leads one to see Barth’s whole textual oeuvre as a continuous ‘life-text’ – is that Barth’s texts, by beginning and ending in medias res and by pointing constantly to the beginning of another story, attempt to cheat death of its inevitable end. Consequently, in Last Voyage, ‘death’, in the guise of the ‘familiar stranger’, is constantly present. Death serves as a narrative reminder to the storyteller that narrative death is always impending: it is almost a constant state of (in particular, written) fiction. Death (or the end) will come when the reader (listener) finishes reading the novel, or stops listening to the story, or when the reader simply decides that he doesn’t want to go on reading (listening) anymore. It is in this sense, therefore, that death in this novel is existential, metaphysical and ontological. From the outset, our expectation of the nameless figure arises from our perception of his function: as a storyteller, he is poised to tell a story. But in order to tell stories, the storyteller must have an audience, one which we fi nd sitting with him on the bed in the form of the female doctor who has come to

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examine him. Moreover, the co-dependent relationship between storyteller and audience is highlighted in the opening of the novel with the image of the (dying) storyteller attempting to hook his doctor (and listener) by telling a ‘good tale’, a situation which once again echoes that of Scheherazade and the frame story of the Nights. However, on his first attempt, the frame narrator (and our ‘dying’ storyteller) quickly learns that his story is already ‘familiar’ to his listener. His hook – ‘I could tell you the one about the death of Scheherazade’ (LVSS 3) – is met with the reply, ‘I’ve heard it [. . .] I’ve heard them all’ (LVSS 3). In other words, the novel opens with the initial narrative exchange between storyteller and listener, whereby the choice of the story as well as the nature of its telling are negotiated. The familiarity of the story to the listener, and the subsequent impatience that she displays – she looks at her watch – highlights the fact that storytelling is an interactive and negotiated process and on an extra-textual level brings the reader into the audience of listeners. Moreover, it is also the extra-textual author’s way of telling ‘his’ audience of readers, that he is aware that he has to do something ‘new’ in order for them to keep reading. In this way, the roles of storytellerwriter and listener-reader are brought together. Interestingly, Scheherazade’s entry into the narrative world of Last Voyage is not coincidental: just as Scheherazade must keep King Shahryar listening in order to stave off death, so, by implication, the frame narrator and storyteller of Last Voyage must keep the doctor listening for the very same reason. In the Nights, Scheherazade achieves this by making sure her nightly stories never finish before the dawn, ending always in the middle, and with an ever-important hook. Indeed, Scheherazade cannot fail in this endeavour: failure here will lead to death and to the end of all stories, including that of her own life. In Last Voyage, therefore, the listener’s reply to the storyteller’s hook, that she’s ‘heard them all before’ is potentially dangerous for the storyteller: without an audience, he loses not only his function but also his ticket into narrative existence. However, it is precisely this relationship of storyteller and audience, of narrative life and death, which Barth’s outer frame serves to establish. Once established, the storyteller can begin with his listener (reader) in tow, happy to enter into the next story and the next, and into a potentially infinite number of stories within stories. Thus Barth’s complex and numerous narrative frames in Last Voyage are a direct attempt to mirror Scheherazade’s nightly vigil with the king (her listener). In this sense, the frame story of Last Voyage mirrors the frame story of the Nights. The foregrounding of the storyteller’s negotiation with the listener, that is, his need to capture the listener’s attention and to provide her with a story she wants to

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hear, is what Barth borrows from the oral tradition and the frame tale, bringing it to the novel form. The listener’s impatience at the proposed story, in particular, points to the key factor in the co-dependent relationship between storyteller and listener; namely, that re-telling a (familiar) story is not enough in itself, and that there has to be something different or new in the storyteller’s retelling of the story in order to capture the the listener’s attention. It is here where Barth’s first conception of postmodernist fiction resonates. Postmodernist literature was conceived of as a ‘literature of replenishment’ precisely because of its ability to take stories from the past, and replenish them, transforming them into something ‘new’. It is in this sense that Last Voyage (like many of his novels) is a prime example of replenishment, and an ode to the frame-tale narrator of the Nights, who has provided Barth with a narrative model that has led him to (re)generate fictions. In Last Voyage, the concept of narrative regeneration is illustrated by evermore (playful) connections between the novel and the Nights. From the very first pages, this relationship is set up with the opening words by the storyteller ‘I could tell you the one about Scheherazade’ (LVSS3). However, it is in the storyteller’s reply to the listener’s ‘I’ve heard them all before’ where Barth’s literary aim, which is to insert the whole frame of the Nights into his own novel, really begins. Not only does the storyteller tell the doctor-listener, `Those were King Shahryar’s very words (. . .) In fact, his last words’ (LVSS 3), but also, and more significantly, the fact that he highlights to her that King Shahryar’s words ‘were wrong’ (LVSS 4) marks the beginning of a series of stories-within-stories which both mirror the structure of the Nights and continue from its `supposed’ ending. Barth is thus able to achieve his aim. Last Voyage and the Nights are united in a double helix loop: our storyteller knows the last story of Scheherazade and the last story of King Shahryar. Barth continues from what would have been an end (a last story) in order to create a beginning. In this way, he connects both the storytellers and their listeners (here Scheherazade and King Shahryar; the teller and listener in the hospital; and the writer and reader of the text), narrative traditions (oral and written) and texts (the Nights and Last Voyage). Although this is not a ‘strict’ re-telling of a story, it is definitely a ‘replenishing’ of one. As Tzvetan Todorov elucidates, this is a feature of frame-tale literature: ‘Even if the embedded story is not directly linked to the embedding story (by identity of characters), characters can pass from one story to the other’43 – here we have Scheherazade and Sindbad, passing into Barth’s novel. Barth’s narrative play here follows Todorov’s formalist explanations. The focus on last once again takes on relevance, as does the presence of the new character.

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As Todorov explains, ‘the appearance of a new character invariably involves the interruption of the preceding story, so that a new story, the one which explains the “now I am here” of the new character, may be told to us.’44 Moreover, he continues, ‘a character trait is not simply the cause of an action, nor simply its effect: it is both at once, just as action is’.45 If, then, the character trait of a newly appearing character is a ‘storyteller’, the implicit story-action that follows will always be the telling of a new story. In other words, the narrative repeatedly moves from one storyteller and story to another, or from one action within the narrative to another. In effect, this repetition creates the narrative embedding. Moreover, given that each ‘character is a potential story that is the story of his life’, and that ‘every new character signifies a new plot’, as is equally true of the Nights, the novel places us ‘in the realm of narrative-men’.46 When the storyteller finally begins his first story with the traditional fairy-tale opening formula ‘once upon a time’ (LVSS 4), he checks his wristwatch, an action that signifies the move into another dimension or time: in other words, into story-time, or the partly-fictional-memory of the past. The watch is a recurring symbol in the novel and serves to indicate a shift from one teller, time and story to another. Death is the hourglass and points to an ending, but as the tellers and listeners of Sinbad’s court do nott recognize wristwatches (being from a century where wristwatches do not exist), then the end of the story seems once again to be unattainable (unrecognizable). As Melinda Rosenthal observes, Last Voyage, in keeping with the meaning of the Nights, ‘is a book about the telling of tales for the enlightenment and instruction of those in the present (wherever the present might be)’.47 The three elements necessary for our wider theme of storytelling for survival are, therefore, made present: time, death and the storyteller. The first story the frame-narrator tells, chapter two of the novel, is also the last story of the heroine of the Nights, Scheherazade, one of a number of fictional storytellers placed within the novel’s numerous narrative frames. Having watched all her family die – presumably because they, unlike her, do not appear in any stories – Scheherazade is still alive, and as it transpires, we meet her at the time of her life when she seeks death. We learn: ‘it finally occurred to her [. . .] that her current situation was just the reverse of her original one’ (LVSS 8). Death has come to visit her and is asking her for one last story, ‘her ticket’ out of narrative existence. But death or the ‘familiar stranger’, as Scheherazade’s description reveals, very much resembles the extra-textual figure of the author, John Barth, a ‘fellow who looked tired, though he is famously tireless: an elderly, grey-bearded, serious-faced chap’ (LVSS 8). The self-consciousness of this obvious allusion to Barth, the writer, serves a definite purpose. Although we must be wary of identifying the author with his fictional counterpart, the character’s similarlity to

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the extra-textual author John Barth is part of Barth’s textual play. Within this hall of mirrors, where one storyteller generates another, we, therefore, also recognize the writerly author of the novel who presents himself as a storyteller. Indeed, his appearance serves to reinforce the fact that, ultimately, he is the one responsible for both Scheherazade’s (narrative) resurrection and death in the novel. What is of significance is that Scheherazade’s resurrection into Barth’s fictional world serves a double purpose: not only does it reiterate the vision of the eternal storyteller, but also by placing her and her frame story in the fictional world of Barth’s novel, the whole collection of the Nights become part of his.48 In this way, Barth not only demonstrates his identification with the tradition of the Nights, but also binds both oral and written narrative traditions and modes, as well as their respective storytellers through the (re)employment of narrative framing. Barth’s play on narrative regeneration is also emphasized by the metaphor of sex: the fertilization of stories by the storyteller. The characters, function as a literal representation of the workings of narrative, and in particular of the narrative embedding that characterizes story collections such as the Nights. Scheherazade’s story which comes ‘late in the day’ (LVSS 9), begins with the tired excuse: ‘I could have offered more but that time’s long past’ (LVSS 9). As the character of a familiar story, the loss of her ‘sexual’ virginity mirrors the loss of the ‘virginity’ of her stories. Echoing her nightly vigil in the framestory of the Nights, Scheherazade must provide her listener with a ‘virgin story’ (LVSS 9) if she is to save herself from death, Destroyer of Delights. Despite not being a ‘virgin’ in the literal sense,49 Scheherazade, as the symbol of narrative regeneration, can still offer a virgin (new) story. Her last ‘night’, or ‘story’, (implied by the number one thousand and one) should mirror her first night, or story, but in reverse. Her answer is, thus, ‘then this last tale will be a virgin story in both respects, for it’s about virginity too, you might say, as was my story [. . .] once upon a time’ (LVSS 10). Scheherazade begins her ‘virgin’ storytelling with the story of ‘The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor’: the fact that it shares the same title as that of the novel might lead the reader to assume that this will be the ‘key’ narrative in the novel. However, before this tale can begin, Barth’s third fictional frame moves further still into a narrative maze of more embedded tales. We are told yet another ‘last’ story of yet another mysterious character (a pun and allusion to the character name Somebody) who lacks any identity but that of storyteller. Instead of ‘the last voyage of Somebody the Sailor’, we begin with the ‘the nextto-last voyage of Sindbad the fabulous Seaman’ (LVSS 13).50 As there are seven voyages of Sindbad, we assume the next-to-last voyage to be voyage six, but instead we hear voyage seven, which leads us to surmise that there might be an

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eighth. However, before we reach this story, we have to listen to Sindbad’s story, a retelling of the version in the original Nights. In order to highlight the history of the Nights tales’ numerous re-tellings and the familiarity of these to both storyteller and listener, the narrative voice is riddled with ‘per usuals’. The fact that Somebody repeatedly uses the phrase ‘per usual’ emphasizes a complicity in the relationship between reader and listener and their shared knowledge of stories. The reader is led through numerous frames and frame narrators, who assume the role of storytellers telling their last story, until eventually we are told, ‘(here comes our story) it wasn’t Sindbad the Sailor who made that final voyage [. . .] you don’t reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings [. . .] serendipitously’ (LVSS 13). The fact that the word ‘serendipitously’ means ‘making fortunate discoveries by accident’ is a metaphor for the storytelling process itself. Somebody’s stories may not lead us to definitively discover his identity because, as I will highlight in the next section, this identity is always shifting and, therefore, unstable. However, it is precisely because Somebody’s identity is unstable, shifting and (importantly) co-constructed that the storyteller can learn from his own storytelling journey. In this sense, the novel is a story about the identity that comes about through the act of telling stories. In order to discover this, we have to learn about his life, a life that will lead to his last story. As Benson suggests, ‘narrative form is always on show in (Barth’s) texts, as the medium via which both characters and readers have access to the real.’51 After the first two frames, yet another set of narrative framing begins, narrated by the two storytellers: Somebody and the original Sindbad of the Nights. A storytelling competition is set up between them to see who will tell the best story. In order to stay in the competition, the storyteller must win over the audience whose key member is Haroun al-Rashid52 himself. The premise of the novel lies in the fact that Somebody, who is lost in medieval Baghdad, has to find his way back to twentieth-century America and to his actual identity by telling his stories. The novel is divided into Somebody’s narratives which begin with ‘Somebody’s first Voyage’ through to his sixth voyage. Interspersing each narrative are narrative ‘interludes’ (beginning with the seventh and counting down) in which Sindbad’s narratives are (re)told and where we meet Somebody after each of the stories of his voyages has been told in the Sindbad household in ‘still-stranded’ medieval Baghdad. Somebody’s voyages are narratives which unfold at key moments in his life, and centred on his birthday. They tell the story of a life, the life of Simon Behler, whose story is an attempt at writing an autobiography. On Somebody’s sixth

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voyage, the two Sindbad narratives become entangled: the reader wonders whether he will finally find his way back to real time and the discovery of the elusive Serendib – the end of the story. But the numerous narrative embeddings make it difficult to ever find the way out. When will we reach the last last story? The ending of the novel finally returns to the story of Somebody who leads us back to Scheherazade and to the original frame-narrator who is lying in the hospital bed. Consequently, when we come back to the original frame at the very end of the novel, the very last line signifies that the storyteller is leaving this world – life – and is approaching death. Thus, the focus of the ‘last story’ takes on a necessary significance: the last story of one storyteller is in fact the first or ‘virgin’ story of the next. As we have seen, this pattern continues throughout the novel and, of course, it is the title of the novel itself. This structure of the frame narrative is defined by Barth in his essay of non-fiction ‘Tales within Tales within Tales’ (1981), in which he also refers to Todorov’s essay above. Barth admits investigating frame-tale literature in order ‘to discover something about that ancient narrative convention which might inspire a story of my own: a story which, whatever else it was about, would also be about stories within stories within stories’.53 This is not the first time Barth has used this technique.54 Last Voyage is an example of ‘fifth-degree narrative’ which Kevin Brown outlines as follows, I. Simon in the hospital tells the story of A. Scheherazade in the hospital telling the story of 1. The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor in which a. Simon tells stories, one of which is (1) the story of Umar55

Indeed, Brown’s illustration is strikingly similar to the following one which Todorov uses as an example from the Nights. The Arabian Nights contain examples of embedding quite as dizzying. The record seems to be held by the narrative which offers us the story of the bloody chest. Here Scheherazade tells that Jaafer tells that the tailor tells that the barber tells that his brother (and he has six brothers) tells that [. . .]56

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Sindbad and Somebody are not the only characters that are having a competition to see who can tell the most entertaining stories; on an extra-textual level, Barth is competing with Scheherazade and trying to better her use of narrative frames. Todorov explains that embedding is an articulation of the most essential property of all narrative. For the embedding narrative is the narrative of a narrative. By telling the story of another narrative, the first narrative achieves its fundamental theme and at the same time is reflected in this image of itself. The embedded narrative is the image of that great abstract narrative of which all the others are merely infinitesimal parts as well as the image of the embedding narrative which directly precedes it. To be the narrative of a narrative is the fate of all narrative which realizes itself through embedding.57 (My emphasis)

Therefore, by embedding the novel with and within numerous narrative frames, Barth achieves the effect as outlined earlier: storytelling becomes his fundamental theme. This is important for Barth and for the main character Simon Behler in this novel, who, as the main storyteller, helps to personify the belief that ‘man is merely a narrative; once the narrative is no longer necessary, he can die. It is the narrator who kills him, for he no longer has a function.’58 Barth’s complex framing structures, his numerous narrative embeddings, reveal the one of the methods in which he employs the storyteller in his fiction, one which serves as a means for narrative inspiration and replenishment. For Barth, the storyteller is a personified construct of the workings of the text and the ways in which it generates fictions. The storyteller, through her act of narration, propels the narrative forward and, in turn, replenishes it with evermore stories. The device, which is hidden in realist modes, is made literal by the use of characters (as storytellers) that map the narrative structure and moves of the text. For Barth, the storyteller, therefore, becomes both the means and the symbol of narrative regeneration and replenishment – a narrative-(wo) man – and it is precisely this that forms the basis of Barth’s appropriation of the storyteller in his fiction and reflects the operation within his conception of postmodernist fiction.

The storyteller and the audience In Last Voyage, the storyteller’s relationship to his audience determines his very existence, as well as the existence of his fictions, the method of their telling and their reception or interpretation. These notions are not only represented

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intra-textually (within the novel), but also relate to the novel’s extra-textual audience, that is, Barth’s critical and non-critical readership. Initially, we meet our storyteller Somebody outside the court of Sindbad, among a throng of beggars who are gathered outside the court of Sindbad: the ‘great’ storyteller. In contrast to the beggars, Sinbad’s audience sits ‘inside’ the court and dines on lavish food and lounges in a circle around the courtyard, eating and drinking. Although Sindbad is already established, due to the popularity and fame of his stories – this is, of course, Medieval Baghdad that Somebody has metaphorically travelled to through story – Somebody, introduced as ‘Somebody the Nobody’ and ‘A foreigner’ (LVSS 14) (as he doesn’t initially belong in this fictional world), must win over the beggars and enter the courtyard in order to compete in a storytelling contest with Sindbad. On one level, the whole scene acts as a metaphor for the novel’s reception: who does Somebody need to win over, popular readership (the beggars) or critical readership (the court)? The novel suggests that both beggars and the critical elite are important. In order to enter into the court, storytelling must first pass the test of being able to ‘entertain’ and please his crowd. Hence, we see Somebody, following the bardic tradition of oral performance, become a ‘singer’ who begins his performance with a rhyming song, We all commence our journey as a little sperm and egg; Yet some wind up as millionaires, while others have to beg. Some plot the course and give commands that others must obey. Some live a hundred years; some die before they’ve lived a day. Some reach safe harbour; some are cast away or lost at sea. To Allah this makes perfect sense. I wish it did to me. (LVSS 15)

Somebody’s rhyme is simplistic and light-hearted but still narrates the story of ‘a life’, human life, which his subsequent stories aim to capture. To the crowd of beggars this kind of storytelling is enough to appease them, and their role as attentive and interactive listeners is stressed in their calls for quiet – ‘Shush’ (LVSS 15) – and mumblings of approval – ‘Hear, hear’ (LVSS 15). For the extratextual reader, the self-conscious description of the oral performance and the presentation of the reactions of ‘Somebody’s listeners’ prompt the reader to identify with them: whether they are beggars, or the ‘elite’ court audience or a combination of both. Somebody echoes the traditional storytellers, therefore, who were able to tell both to the humble peasantry and the court of kings and proves that storytelling does not discriminate. However, without the audience the storyteller would not be able to tell. The storyteller’s skill is proven in his ability to tell his tale in a way that fits in with the expectations of his audience.

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For the storyteller, Somebody (Simon Behler), this is precisely what he must learn through his storytelling performances: each time he performs he is aware that he will be judged. When he enters the court of Sindbad a storytelling competition begins. To prove himself worthy he must tell his own stories as Seven Voyages, (paralleling the Seven of Sindbad and the Nights) and it is in this sense, that he becomes a ‘self-styled Sindbad’ (LVSS 13). However, his stories are not voyages per se, but largely follow the narrative mode of conventional realism, that sit within the conventional American novel. In his subsequent narratives we learn that Somebody is a writer, who is struggling to please his ‘local’ audience, popular American readership. On another level, therefore, the opening scene serves to situate the contest in the larger frame of narrative and storytelling traditions: between realism and fantasy, written and oral, East and West. Somebody’s voyage, therefore, ‘navigated through the dark’ (LVSS 161) is also a voyage into another narrative tradition, the oral storytelling tradition of the Nights. This is ultimately Barth’s larger project, and it is this (fictional) audience (his implied readers) which he needs to convince, Is there no room at the inn of literature for the writer who sets about to create [. . .] either alternatives to reality or alternative realities? The millions of enjoyers of fantastic fiction – of Odysseus’s and Sindbad’s voyages [. . .] would vociferously protest.59

Last Voyage’s larger fictional project is thus a metaphor for the writerstoryteller’s own interpretation and discovery of ways of telling stories in the novel. Barth’s experiment in Last Voyage is how to merge two narrative traditions: the novelist’s ‘inherited’ tradition of novelistic realism and the traditional storytelling practices of oral storytellers. In this sense, Last Voyage can be understood as investigating the line between the novel – which posits what Benjamin called ‘the quest for the meaning of life’60 – and the oral tale – which Benjamin saw as providing us with some form of counsel, ‘the moral of the story’,61 or between the novelist and storyteller. In the novel, this question is played out in each of the narrative ‘interludes’ which follow Somebody’s ‘Voyages’; here, Somebody’s audience comments on the storytelling performance, engaging specifically with these questions. For example, one such scene follows the narration of Simon’s first voyage, which, significantly, Simon has narrated in the voice of a ‘conventional’ novelistic realism. Sindbad comments: Hum. Mechanical birds and bracelets that measure time. Yet who would have believed a sleeping whale over-grown with trees and beaches if he had

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not himself mistaken one for an island and been carried under? And that business of your brother’s drifting in a leaky vessel that must ceaselessly be bailed: that speaks to my condition! An admirable bit of realism in a sea of fantasy. (LVSS 60)

However, in a nudge–nudge, wink–wink of Barthian narrative play, the novel reverses expectations: for Sindbad, airplanes (‘mechanical birds’) and watches (‘bracelets that measure time’), are fantastical, two examples that serve to illustrate the very constructedness of ‘realism’ and its inherent illusoriness. Moreover, the commentary provided here by Sindbad once again highlights the fact that the storytelling traditions are a negotiation between storyteller and audience, and that the method of telling and receiving the story is a negotiated space. In this way, the novel emphasizes that storytelling traditions, both written and oral, are essentially interpretable and interpreted as ‘new’ and ‘novel’ (a nod to Barth’s own label of postmodernist fiction) by the particular audience which listens to them: the community of listeners and readers. On the one hand, to tell in a traditional way does not necessarily have to be fantastical and we do not necessarily need to return to medieval Baghdad. Novelistic realism is also a tradition within the larger frame of storytelling, and another tool in the storyteller’s toolbox. On the other hand, this said, if the art of the storyteller is both to entertain and to instruct, then as the frame-tale narrator of Last Voyage learns, an audience requires new stories, even if they are familiar (like Scheherazade’s story and the stories in the Nights), and new ways of seeing the world. The moral lesson of Barth’s ‘story’, or the ‘counsel’ that it provides, is a lesson in the art of telling and listening to stories, one which lies beyond the categories of novel, oral story, writer and storyteller. Somebody’s six voyages are a place where the storytelling dictates and teaches both the storyteller and his audience how to listen (or read) to the storytelling performance. As the stories progress the voices and narrative modes merge, reflecting the union and fertilization of these traditions (a metaphor for storytelling which Barth steals from Scheherazade). The direct references to the Nights, (e.g. LVSS 107, 519) storytelling practices, the act of narration and to Scheherazade herself all serve to reinforce this. As Somebody reaches the end of his voyages, characters (such as Daisy – Day-zee), voices and places from his ‘realistic world’ shift into the fantastical world of medieval Baghdad, moving the narrative from realistic to symbolic, from realism to fantasy. His former narrated world of realism and his role as novelist and writer, where ‘virtually everything in Baylor’s life was grist for “Baylor’s”62 mill’ (LVSS 208), move to the ability to tell ‘life-stories’ as

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narrative play. Barth’s complex employment of narrative embedding is a means by which he suggests we can cheat the novel from its ‘sense of an ending’, the tenet of novelistic realism. This is the lesson that Somebody, who eventually becomes Sīmon Bey el-Loor, the writer-cum-storyteller, learns. Beyond Barth’s ambition to ‘replenish’ and/ or ‘exhaust’ literature, lies the insistent reminder that the audience is integral to the storyteller, whether as an interpretative community such as Sindbad’s audience, or as a popular audience such as the community of beggars, who are simply happy to be entertained. Barth says: ‘What to do for yet another and yet another encore? How to save and save again one’s narrative neck?’63 The art of the storyteller lies in his ability to adapt to the audience and to borrow from whatever traditions suit, to combine, re-tell and thus replenish stories in order to keep them alive.

Naming the storyteller The name and identity of the storytellers in the novel becomes problematic, a phenomenon that Yusur Al-Madani describes as ‘narration as predicament’ (LVSS 10). Al-Madani’s notion links to Todorov’s notion of characters becoming the story, thus marking our subsequent entry into ‘the realm of narrative men’. Both the marooned and still-stranded Sindbad and Somebody as ‘narrators renarrating Scheherazade’s stories of their lives [. . .] thus become narrated characters themselves as well as narratees who attentively follow the charts of each other’s narrative voyages in an attempt to discover, recover and reaffirm their identities.’64 Their identities as storytellers, however, lie in the realms of their own specific narrative times: Sindbad’s in the realm of the Arabian Nights’ Baghdad, and Somebody’s in the realm of a realistic novel sometime in twentiethcentury America. Storytelling, for Barth, becomes more than just the subject of this particular novel; it is the place where the storyteller practises his art and makes himself known in his own frame story. This frame story, however, does not simply lie within the pages of the book, but exists outside it, the entire novel becoming one of the many stories within its unwritten pages. For Barth, the true frametale exists in the unwritten pages of the author’s story and his own reasons for storytelling/writing. Here, the idea of a ‘death sentence’ finds its meaning. Barth does not have a literal death sentence imposed on him, as did Rushdie, or a fictional one, as does Scheherazade, but for Barth time and life itself provide this all by themselves. Storytelling in Barth’s fiction becomes a question of ontology

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and it is this ontological aspect which maps with what McHale later identified as a tendency within (American) postmodernism.65 It happened that in 1990 a number of things in my life and work came more or less to an end in rather quick succession. Through that year I wound up the final editing of a new novel – my eleventh book, tenth volume of fiction, eighth novel – with the terminal-sounding title The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. It is a comedy whose dark muse is, in fact, that figure called by Scheherazade ‘the Destroyer of Delights, Severer of Societies and Desolator of Dwelling-Places’: lethal Time.66

Barth’s idea that all fiction really begins with the question of identity, of ‘Who am I?’, is reflected in the character of his primary storyteller Somebody. The mysterious hospitalized storyteller who begins the novel becomes a Somebody whose name changes as he moves through his psuedo-autobiographical fictional lives. In the first voyage, he is known as Simon William Behler, (Simmons incidentally being John Barth’s middle name, reinforcing the link between real and fictional storytellers). In the second voyage, he is dubbed ‘Simmon67 by his first girlfriend Daisy Moore because she thinks he looks like a persimmon when he’s having sex’ (LVSS 83). In voyage three, he calls himself Baylor, having become a journalist and wanting to differentiate himself from ‘S. W. Behler of the Star’ because the new spelling ‘looks more the way it sounds’ (LVSS 196). This highlights the oral aspect of his names and moves the reader to pronounce the two names, if not out loud, but enough to ‘hear’ them. In voyage four, he procures the initial ‘B’ by Julia Moore, who says: ‘Simmon? Simon? Bill? Can’t I just call you B?’ (LVSS 309). Finally, from the fifth voyage until his return ‘home’, he is called either Sīmon or Bey el-Loor (LVSS 405) or a combination of both. Somebody’s name changes reflect his coming to life through the telling of his stories and his discovery of his narrative self which is also reflected in his language which increasingly takes on Arabic vocabulary, and the ‘flowery’ language of a stereotyped, parodied (though imaginary) storyteller who would be worthy of Sindbad’s court. His narrative moves between two fictional traditions and times (realistic autobiographical writing) and oral storytelling traditions (the Nights) so that his final name reflects the merging of both traditions, which is, of course, a purposeful reflection of the construction and content of the novel itself. Barth’s admiration for and competition with Scheherazade reveal that he too wants to be remembered by name within the fiction itself not as Somebody– Nobody but as Somebody who is Somebody, who is John Barth and who is as gifted a storyteller as the infamous Scheherazade. By meeting her in the

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story-world at the moment she is ready to die, Barth’s narrator-storyteller fulfils his desire to continue her legacy in this narrative present (twentieth-century America). By conjuring Scheherazade and writing about her narrative death, he not only replaces her, but also continues the story from where she left: in this way, he becomes a storyteller who follows the same tradition. Barth’s insistence on the figure of the storyteller helps bridge the often separatist gap between the traditions of oral storytelling and the novel. Indeed, herein lies the real key to Barth’s conception of postmodern literature, of replenishing and reinterpreting past literature, which both includes, and insists on, the idea of storytelling as means of understanding ourselves, our present and our future potential, and our fictional and real lives. It is in voyages five and six when all begins to be revealed. Here, the storytellers’ stories, as well as the times in which they tell them, become entangled. All subsequent stories centre around the ‘Tub Night’ and the story of Sindbad’s daughter Yasmin’s ‘deflowering’ (LVSS 515). Of course, this story suddenly acquires what seems like a thousand different tellings: by Jaydā, by Yasmīn, by Sindbad, by Somebody, by Sahīm al-Layl. These versions are subsequently investigated by the famous Haroun Al-Rashīd, who tries to discover which is the correct, or ‘true’, version. However, his quest is futile as the ‘true’ version ultimately doesn’t exist. As Al-Madani suggests, ‘a tale thus told suggests that none of its narrators can lay claim to possessing the truth of experience or of the self, for truth is constructed and is as varied and self-contradictory as narrative itself.’68 This mirrors not only Barth’s whole ‘life-story’ (which we understand to be a culmination of all of his writings), but also the life of any one storyteller whose retellings of a story are bound to differ, à la Parry and Lord.69 What we learn, therefore, is that re-narration, or any type of retelling, inevitably leads to discrepancies and makes any particular story, or life, essentially intangible. The shift from Simon through to Bey el-Loor is more than just a reflection of his search for who he really is,70 rather it essentially reflects the story of a life that he is trying to piece together in order to get to the end (death) with a sense of purpose. Moreover, the name change from Behler to Bey el-Loor not only highlights his own fictionality, and the shape-shifting role of the storyteller, but also reflects Barth’s own views on the nature of stories and the meaning of life, which are always linked to the figure of the storyteller. In the ever-shifting and unreliable narrative of Simon Behler, therefore, is the recognition that (a) life is elusive and uncapturable: We are constantly changing and our present, past and future are in a constant state of flux and re-imagining. In this sense, neither Behler, Barth nor our own selves are ever truly fully known and thus, neither is

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the writer-storyteller: in all of these selves we always find a part invention, a part fiction. The lesson to be learnt from the telling of the story of our storytellerSindbad-Behler is that what is important is not the quest for his identity, but instead the recognition that his life and ours as a series of stories told by storytellers all of which converge in the figure of Scheherazade who continues telling to save herself from death. Benjamin’s notion here that Barth’s obsession with Scheherazade relates to her function as the frame-narrator of the Nights. The frame story she tells and her actual predicament describes how, with each story she tells, she is literally ‘storytelling for survival’ and that her audience the king is her ultimate critic. However, as Barth reminds us, this is only part of Scheherazade’s story; the other part of which ‘lives’ within the world of the book. In the lines of this book, they remained until eventually they are taken away by the Destroyer of Delights, literally ‘robbed’ from the king’s treasure chest. Scheherazade’s tales are published (in 30 volumes), and their author lives happily with her hard-earned family. But not ever after; only until they are taken by the Destroyer of Delights, whereafter we’re specifically told, ‘their houses fell waste and their palaces lay in ruins [. . .] and (other) kings inherited their riches’ including The Thousand and One Nights.71

In Last Voyage, we meet Scheherazade just before she dies and is taken away by the Destroyer of Delights. Her ticket out of the Nights’ story is the story of Somebody the Sailor who is telling his story in order to survive and escape his death. As Heide Ziegler reveals, ‘the dialogic relationship between the stories told and the framing story, by which their structure becomes mutually dependent, tightens yet again to become absolute closure or death.’72 This death, we now understand in the light of Todorov, marks the end of the story of both Somebody-Behler and Scheherazade’s life. However, there is another level to the story of the Nights, which the above quote by Barth reveals, that offers yet another interesting parallel with the resurrected Barthian Scheherazade. The Destroyer of Delights, or death, is mentioned in relation to the story of the book: The Thousand and One Nights. The fictional Scheherazade may have ‘died’ in the historical time within which her fictional world is based, and the delights of her story(ies) may have ended, nevertheless the story of the book within which her frame tale and all subsequent stories that are contained within this, still lives on. The book proves to be the ultimate frame or container of Scheherazade’s story and with it, the numerous stories included within the frame. Indeed, as Rosenthal reminds us, even Burton’s famous 1885 translation of the Nights ‘is not the story of the nights, but of The Book of the

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Thousand Nights and Night’.73 Barth’s placement of Scheherazade into his novel Last Voyage and his re-inscription of the story of the Nights within the frame of another story-book, at one at the same time, both inserts his novel into the frame of the Nights and inserts the Nights into the frame of Last Voyage. Barth thus proves to be continuing in the tradition of all the nameless storyteller ‘Somebody’s’ that gave rise to the tradition in the first place, both oral and written. By re-telling and re-plenishing literature and by uniting the stories in the Nights, which reflect both oral and written traditions of storytelling, he reinvigorates the novelistic (and written) tradition within which his own fiction is placed. John Barth’s self-conscious use of narrative embedding and his equally selfconscious appropriation of the storyteller in his fiction, does not mean that his fiction is but a surface pursuit. As he says of his use of tales within tales, Why in fact have human beings in so many cultures and centuries been fascinated by tales within tales within tales etc.? . . . The first speculation is that of Jorge Luis Borges (who) declares that stories within stories appeal to us because they disturb us metaphysically. We are by them reminded, consciously or otherwise, of the next frame out: the fiction of out own lives, of which we are both the authors and the protagonists, and in which our reading of The 1001 Nights’, say, is a story within our story.74

As his muse Scheherazade shows him, the purpose of storytelling is to tell life itself, to remember who we are, to keep on living, and survive. Simon’s shifting identity from Somebody to Simon Beylor represents the experiences we have of our own shifting identities and stories. It is in the evershifting and continuous flux of life that we live, a life lived in the shadow of our last story, and one which we can neither know the ending to, nor ever come to understand its meaning. It is in this way that the ‘experience’ of life in Barth’s novel proves to be existential and equally, in this way that he achieves his larger project which is to communicate it to a audience of listeners inclusive of both popular and elite readership. Following in the tradition of the storyteller, who could sing to peasants and kings, Barth proves that he is a Somebody, a writer-cumstoryteller, for whom life, like all our lives, is a story that might or might not be remembered and one whose meaning is, ultimately, elusive. Through the creation of his corpus (or life-text), of which Last Voyage is a part, Barth proves that it is through the telling of stories that we may come to live. The storyteller thus emerges as the quintessential figure who is poised to tell us our stories. Moreover, and most significantly, it is in the figure of the storyteller that we ultimately find our identity and ourselves.

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Although Barth has been placed within the category of ‘postmodernist fiction’, he has tried to surpass categories by almost becoming a category himself. Indeed, Barth’s fiction helps us perhaps to see that the creation of categories is a chimera – is itself fictional. Rather than focus on questions of authorship or critical categories, Barth returns us to our roots and asks that we might instead focus on the storyteller who is still busy creating fictions for his audience of listeners and readers. As Barth says himself, Although I still hold to my basic notion of what Postmodernist fiction is [. . .] I have happily withdrawn from the on-going disputes over its definition and its canon [. . .] Postmodernism is whatever I do, together with my crewmates-thistime-around, until the critics rename the boat again.75

Barth’s relationship with the text shows that it belongs to a dialogic space, a plural place where the writer, following in the footsteps of the traditional storyteller, shows he can perform and change his texts to suit his audience. Indeed, this is not a novel, but a necessary and ancient practice, and one which is linked to the notion of survival. For Barth, survival includes: his story, his telling, his fictions. It is in storytelling that we see survival; storytelling which, as we saw in Crace, Varga’s Llosa’s and Rushdie’s texts, that storytelling is linked to our evolutionary capacity and our sense of who we are. In Last Voyage, Barth proves that storytelling provides us with the means to escape death, to keep on telling, to continue the narrative of our life. As Barth highlights, physical death may come to us, but as the story of Scheherazade has proven, we can continue to live through the telling and retelling of our stories. And you know, don’t you, scribbler of these lines, that beyond a writer’s untimely demise [. . .] lies the prospect of his or her not-so untimely demise [. . .] – if not in this decade, then in the next, at latest the one after – and that these musely recovery times are as likely to lengthen as one’s other recovery times, until comes the intermission that no next act follows. You’re in robust health [. . .] but you’re not age-proof.76

By creating a huge ‘life-text’ and by crafting his novels such as Last Voyage so that their main themes are concerned with storytelling, Barth has not only proved his legacy to Scheherazade and the Nights but has shown most poignantly that the storyteller still lives both within and outside the fictional world of the novel, in the larger world of story; and it is the storyteller who assumes all narrative positions, who tells our life stories, even those we do not recognize belong to us yet. ‘Scheherazade, c’est moi. King too. That muezzin, even, whom ever at my back I hear while with some third ear listening, listening.’77

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Notes 1 This is a reference to Barth’s essay ‘The Literature of Replenishment’. See John Barth, The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-fiction (New York: Perigee Books, 1984), 86. 2 Ibid. 3 See ibid., 100. 4 John Barth, Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures and Other Non-Fiction, 1984–1994 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), 183. 5 Ibid. 6 Malcom Bradbury, The Modern American Novel. New edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 231, qtd in Stephen Benson, Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale, Theory (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 130. 7 Robert Murray Davis, ‘When Was Postmodernism?’ World Literature Today 75.2 (Spring 2001): 296. 8 John Simmons Barth, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (New York: Doubleday, 1991). For the rest of this chapter I refer to this novel using the abbreviated title Last Voyage. All in-text quotations will refer to this edition of the novel and will appear to use LVSS followed by the page number. 9 Benson, Cycles of Influence, 138. 10 Ibid., 142. 11 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, Illuminations (London: Cape, 1970), 7. 12 Barth, The Friday Book, 17. 13 John B. Vickery, ‘The Functions of Myth in John Barth’s Chimera’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 38.2 (1992): 427. 14 John Simmons Barth was born on 27 May 1930 in Cambridge, Maryland, USA. Barth’s last published book to date is Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011). 15 In 1956 Barth was nominated for the National Book Award for The Floating Opera (1956). From 1965–6 he received: the National Institute of Arts and Letters grant in literature, the Brandeis University creative arts award in fiction and the Rockefeller Foundation grant in fiction. In 1968 his novel Lost in the Funhouse (1968) was nominated for the National Book Award and in 1972 he was awarded it for his novel Chimera (1972). In 1974 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1997 he received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction and in 1998, the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1998 he won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and in 1999, the Enoch Pratt Society’s Lifetime Achievement in Letters Award.

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16 Barth, Further Fridays, 191. 17 Barth, The Friday Book, 204. 18 This is a reference to Barth’s essay ‘The Literature of Replenishment’. See The Friday Book, 193–206. 19 Ibid., 73. 20 Ibid., 74. 21 Ibid., 63. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 73. 24 Barth, ‘Muse Spare Me’, in The Friday Book, 57. 25 Barth, The Friday Book, 57. 26 Stephen Benson names his chapter on Barth by this title. See Benson, Cycles of Influence, 130–47. 27 Ibid., 131. 28 Susan Poznar, ‘Barth’s “Compulsion to Repeat: Its Hazards and Possibilities”’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 10.2 (1990): 64–75. As a way of illustrating this point, Poznar’s essay concentrates on the Todd Andrew’s story in Barth’s Letters (1979) which first appears in The Floating Opera (1956). 29 Charles A. S. Ernst, ‘Night-sea Journeying: The Text-world and Life-text of John Barth’, Cithara 1 (2004): 45. 30 This was first published in The Atlantic in January 1980, then again in 1982 by Lord John Press of Northridge, California to which a ‘headnote’ was added. Finally, it was published in the collection of essays in a book called The Friday Book. See Barth, ‘Replenishment’, 193. 31 Barth, ‘Replenishment’, 203. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 204. 34 Ibid., 205. 35 Brian McHale, ‘Afterword: Reconstructing Postmodernism’, Narrative 21.3 (2013): 358. 36 I am calling it more ‘plausible’ here in relation to Benjamin’s pronouncement that the storyteller had disappeared, at a time which coincided (broadly) with the conception of literary modernist writing. 37 Susan Stanford Friedman has argued this point very succinctly. See Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/ Modernity/ Modernism’, Modernism/Modernity 8.3 (September 2001): 493–513. 38 McHale, ‘Afterword’, 359. 39 Ibid. 40 Benson, Cycles of Influence, 144. 41 Ibid., 146.

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42 Barth, The Friday Book, 221. 43 Ibid., 71–2. 44 Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 70. 45 Ibid., 68. 46 Ibid., 70. 47 Melinda M. Rosenthal, ‘Burton’s Literary Uroburos: The Arabian Nights as SelfReflexive Narrative’, Pacific Coast Philology 25.1–2 (1990): 122. 48 Any well-versed reader of Barth’s novels would know that this is not the first time that Barth has tried to cheat his way into the Scheherazade’s story and claim it as his own. I am referring, of course, to his novel Chimera (1972). 49 Scheherazade is an old woman with many children spawned after her nightly vigils with King Shahryar over one thousand and one nights. 50 Barth’s play on the word Seaman-Semen is a way of continuing the metaphor of seduction, sex and storytelling, and the notion of Barth fertilizing Scheherazade’s stories with his own. 51 Benson, Cycles of Influence, 134. 52 Haroun Al-Rashid is a famous character in The Nights, features in Chapter 5 on Rushdie. 53 Barth, The Friday Book, 225. 54 Barth has used this technique of framing in some of his other novels of which Chimera is the most striking example. 55 Kevin Brown, ‘Structural Devices in John Barth’s the Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor’, CLA Journal 41.4 (1998): 471. 56 See Todorov, Poetics, 71. 57 Ibid., 72–3. 58 Ibid., 75. 59 Barth, Further Fridays, 142. 60 Benjamin, Illuminations, 99. 61 Ibid. 62 ‘Baylor’ is the title to a series of novels within which he draws from his life experiences. 63 Barth, The Friday Book, 219–20. 64 Yusur Al-Madani, ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing a Narrative of the Self: John Barth’s The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor’, The International Fiction Review 26.1 (1999): 10. 65 See footnote 35 above. (McHale, Narrative). 66 Barth, Further Fridays, 159. 67 This apostrophe is meant to indicate that the ‘per’ from persimmon is absent, hence ’Simmon.

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68 Al-Madani, International Fiction Review, 11. 69 Milman Parry and Albert Lord investigated oral storytellers in the Balkans, and found that despite the fact the storytellers thought they were telling exactly the same stories, their words differed slightly on each telling although the meaning and story stayed essentially the same. See Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales. 1960 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 70 Brown, CLA Journal, 474. 71 Barth, The Friday Book, 57. 72 Heide Ziegler, ‘The Tale of the Author: Or, Scheherazade’s Betrayal’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 10.2 (1990): 87. 73 Rosenthal, Pacific Coast Philology, 117. 74 Barth, The Friday Book, 236. 75 Ibid., 121. 76 Barth, Further Fridays, 162. 77 Ibid., 162–3.

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7

Storyteller(-ess): A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’

The first true storyteller, is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Benjamin, Illuminations, 102 In the introduction, I stressed that the storyteller, as a transhistorical and transcultural figure, is one that is neither gender-specific nor shows genderbias. Moreover, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, gender is not inherent in the term storyteller. As Ivan Kreilkamp notes, the fact that ‘the storyteller takes either male of female form without fundamentally altering the ideological and aesthetic work it performs’, or, in other words, the storyteller’s ‘flexibility in regard to gender’, is what gives the ideology of the myth of the storyteller its ‘strength and resilience’.1 Indeed, my own presentation of the storyteller in this book has followed Kreilkamp in this regard and my argument for the return of the storyteller is not one that relates to a gendered figure rather, that contemporary writers’ engagement with the storyteller asserts an identification with the storyteller as an ‘archetypal figure’, as a kind of ‘ancestor’ to the writer. Nevertheless, this said, it does not mean that in appropriating and engaging with the figure of the storyteller writers cannot and do not problematize issues of gender. For feminist writers such as A. S. Byatt, this gendering of the storyteller reveals itself as a necessary concern in discussions of contemporary literature and in her ‘adult’ fairy tale, ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ (1994),2 becomes both subject and driver in her fiction. A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Djinn’ is the longest of a collection of stories which shares the title’s name and is the focus of this chapter. It tells the story of a 50-something Dr Gillian Perholt, a narratologist who travels to Ankara, Turkey, to give a paper at a conference titled ‘Stories of Women’s Lives’ (DNE 105). A

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middle-aged woman, whose children have flown the nest and whose husband has abandoned her for a younger woman, Gillian’s story begins as another finishes – the story of her domestic life – and this marks the beginning of a series of numerous embedded stories throughout the narrative, all of which have a thematic focus on women’s storytelling. Set within the tradition of revisionist fairy tales, ‘The Djinn’ raises questions directly concerned with gendering authorship. The positions of critic-narratologist and fiction writerstoryteller are not only interplayed against each other, but are also further problematized by viewing them directly through the prism of gender, in other words, by compelling us to look at the narratologist as narratologist-ess and the storyteller as storyteller-ess. ‘The Djinn’ asks: how does gender affect our conceptions of authorship both in terms of criticism and fiction writing? Moreover, how does gender affect the writing-telling and the interpretative reception of our fictional and critical texts? As A. S. Byatt has stated very emphatically: ‘All my books are about the woman artist – in that sense, they’re terribly feminist books – and they’re about what language is.’3 These questions are part of what preoccupies Byatt as a critic/writer and female storyteller and thus lend insight into understanding the larger project of Byatt’s fiction within which ‘The Djinn’ is placed. In ‘The Djinn’, the tension between male and female storytellers is set against the backdrop of a larger tension between oral and written narrative traditions, storyteller and writer. As Kreilkamp argues, the loss of the storyteller according to Benjamin represented the loss of an authoritative, individual cultural producer, subsumed by the inhuman and now disembodied, voice within print. In the context of the Victorian era, Kreilkamp thus saw the return of the storyteller within print as an attempt to return the individual authority of a ‘charismatic’4 authentic speaker (such as Dickens), to the text. Although the flagpoles have shifted, we are neither in the Victorian, nor the modern but the postmodern era, Byatt’s return to the storyteller follows a similar impulse. For Byatt however, this impulse has two dimensions. On one level, her return to the storyteller reflects the attempt to negotiate the space between two narrative traditions, the oral and the written, in other words, the differences between narrating ‘stories’ and ‘novels’; thus the storyteller, as a figure that straddles both traditions, represents her attempt to replenish and revive her writing by acknowledging both influences. On the other, and perhaps this is her more powerful message, that in so doing, she seeks, following the impulse of the Victorian storyteller, to reinstate the storyteller(-ess) as an authoritative, individual cultural producer, as a charismatic and authentic voice to written

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fiction. Byatt’s storyteller is one that is not so much pitched against print culture, but against the authority of the male as dominant cultural producer of both oral and written narrative traditions. It is this movement of the voice of the storyteller against male patriarchal voices that Kreilkamp also recognizes as an impulse that began from early feminist criticism, to which Byatt can be seen to ascribe. Kreilkamp sees this appropriation of the storyteller by feminist critics implicitly (if not explicitly) formulated in texts such as Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic (1979), where the storyteller becomes an ‘invisible’ metaphor for ‘supressed female voices’, but which otherwise fits into the Benjaminian model of the loss of the authentic voice of the storyteller to an inorganic and bureaucratic modernity.5 He observes: Gilbert and Gubar gender the paradigm such that the bureaucratic structure becomes masculine, the thwarted female speaker feminine, but they otherwise retain the basic terms of Benjamin’s model. Intellectual autonomy – in a formulation that becomes enormously influential on the novel criticism of the past two decades – becomes figure in the emergence and speaking out of a suppressed and threatened voice.6

For Kreilkamp this reflection of female voice sits neatly with his reading of Benjamin’s essay on the storyteller, and it is this notion of intellectual autonomy that Byatt reasserts in ‘The Djinn’. If, as Kreilkamp posits, the voice of the storyteller is construed by the intellectual as a ‘source of charismatic power’ one which has the ability to resurface within the text, it is this voice that Byatt seeks to reinstate in ‘The Djinn’, albeit by placing the source into the figure of a female teller. Precisely because the female has been marginalized in all these positions – as intellectual, as writer and as storyteller – by the more dominant discourses of men, Byatt’s project as a woman and an intellectual writer and storyteller is an assertion of this in terms of feminist politics. Byatt has endowed her protagonist with attributes that directly reflect these concerns. Gillian’s position as narratologist (Dr Perholt) asserts her status as ‘intellectual’ which, in turn, serves to further qualify her as an authoritative figure. This, along with her status as storyteller, can produce the image of the powerful female cultural producer, a construct which is set up to counter, if not challenge, the more dominant role and authority of the individual male ‘cultural producer’.7 It is important that Gillian, as a ‘middle-aged’ woman and not the young heroine of traditional fairy tales, is the protagonist of the story; this grants woman a ‘new’ role in the fairy tale, one which opens up the possibility

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for new narrative possibilities for women’s stories. The fact that she is posited as a powerful representation of the female as intellectual and storyteller lends a powerful aura to this figure, and reflects ‘The Djinn’s’ theme and polemic, which, driven by the voice of the narrator, ultimately draws us yet further back to seek the figure of the writer, Byatt, as ‘creator’ of the text. This tripling of female storyteller figures in the text, the peeling back of layers, reasserts at each layer, the image of a powerful female storyteller and in this way returns the female storyteller to her rightful place in written fiction.

Storyteller self-consciousness and intertextual antics Along with most of the writers in this book, Byatt has been versed in both creative and academic critical writing and this presents itself in her writing as a strong tendency towards writerly self-consciousness.8 Byatt’s fiction directly and indirectly juxtaposes the creative world of fiction and the analytical world of critical thinking. Of her 11 novels and 5 story collections to date, most have some relation to academia, literature writing or art, and, most interestingly, the majority involve themselves in some way with critical discourses about reading, writing and telling stories. Her first novel, Shadow of the Sun (1964) is about a young woman trying to escape the influences of her novelist father. Frederica Potter, the heroine of her later novel Still Life (1985), fantasizes as a Cambridge undergraduate that she will write ‘a new urban novel like those of Iris Murdoch’9; and in one of her most popular novels, Possession (1990), Christabel La Motte writes ‘children’s stories and religious poetry in the 1850s’ and in particular, she writes ‘an epic called The Fairy Melusina’, a piece which we learn ‘the feminisits are crazy about [because] it expresses women’s impotent desire.’10 Each of the above examples (albeit sketchily) demonstrates Byatt’s preoccupation with women as writers and poets. But it is in Byatt’s later fiction (post 1990) that we more readily begin to recognize a preoccupation with the storyteller and storytelling practices. Byatt interweaves scholarly and intellectual practices with fairy tales, myths and mystical truths and in this way, her textual authors move more towards an identification with the figure of the storyteller rather than centering exclusively on the writer. As Elizabeth Wanning Harries has argued, the fairy-tale motif is traceable in Byatt’s fictional oeuvre, and is visible in characters such as Christable La Motte in Possession and Matty Crompton in Morpho Eugenia (1992). In these figures we recognize both the fairy-tale writer and the storyteller, motifs which are present in ‘The Djinn’.11 In two of Byatt’s most recent novels, we see these

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preoccupations continued: in The Children’s Book (2009) the main character writes children’s stories, and in Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011) Byatt interweaves stories from Norse mythology to create a powerful tale with apocalyptic focus. Although these examples are not analysed in any depth, nevertheless, they point to a consistent preoccupation in Byatt’s fiction with the practice of reading, writing, academic criticism and storytelling, of which ‘The Djinn’ is paradigmatic. Critics have repeatedly commented on Byatt’s inexhaustible knowledge of literature, as Noakes and Reynolds point out, she is ‘as a voracious reader, an eminent academic, and a philosopher and critic, Byatt’s work gives us access to an astonishing breadth of reference and systems of thought. Nothing is too large for her, and nothing too small. But everything is connected and inclusive.’12 As Annegret Maack notes, ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ is profoundly intertextual, alluding to the Arabian tales from The Thousand and One Nights, to Grimm’s fairy tales, Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the Epic of Gilgamesh, Euripides’s Bacchae, Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, Balzac’s Peau de Chagrin and Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, to mention only some of the more clearly marked sources. Explicit quotations are made from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.13

On one level, Byatt’s texts might thus be understood as a series of gentle pedagogic pushes towards further reading – as she says herself, ‘I like to spark people on to reading another thing and another thing.’14 Indeed, Byatt’s acute awareness of the reader emphasizes the duplicitous role the reader has in the creation of the fiction, and ‘The Djinn’ presumes upon a reader who is versed in fiction. However, as we have observed in the examples drawn from other writers in this book, there is more to Byatt’s intertextuality than simple narrative ‘play’. Byatt’s textual choices are integral to the narrative itself and serve to propel the narrative forward. The numerous embedded narratives throughout ‘The Djinn’ not only relate to the frame-tale – the story of Gillian Perholt – but, more importantly, their re-telling and reinterpretation by the narratologist allow her to move through the telling of her own story towards the discovery of her own storyteller voice, a voice which seeks to assert her position as a authoritative and powerful female storyteller and cultural producer. The text’s allusions to powerful female figures drawn from both history and mythology – Artemis, Sheba, Scheherazade – and the plethora of female figures and stories that populate the narrative, all work to compound this focus on storyteller as gendered, as storyteller-ess.

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Interestingly, Byatt’s self-conscious re-appropriation of the storyteller figure in her fiction is traceable and reflects the subsequent turn in her fiction towards ‘story’; it stems from a chance discovery that Byatt made of a trend for ‘storytelling’ in the novel when she was appointed chairman of judges for the presentation of the European Literature prize in 1990. In the essay ‘Old Tales, Old Forms’ (2000),15 Byatt talks about a resurgence of interest in ‘storytelling’ which she observed after reading a number of novels that had been put forward for this prize: ‘I realised I had discovered a pattern of forms and ideas new at least to me – and at the same times as old as Western Literature.’16 Byatt recognizes this trend in the writing of her peers: ‘Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie in Britain in the 1970s said they felt their energy derived more from reading tales than from reading novels, and used tales, old, invented and reinvented.’17 For Byatt, ‘some of the interest in storytelling is to do with doubts about the classic novel, with its interest in the construction of the Self and the relation of that Self to culture, social and political, surrounding it’18 and it is this idea that she is concerned with in ‘The Djinn’. Byatt’s self-conscious reworking of the fairy-tale form in ‘The Djinn’ reflects the fact that she has an eye on current ‘trends’ of literary criticism and theory, which, in turn, present themselves in her writing, operating on a meta-textual and inter-textual level. The self-consciousness in ‘The Djinn’ is centred around an interest in the storyteller and storytelling and is reflected in the novella in various ways: the use of fairy-tale and folk-tale tropes and devices; the use of a frame-tale structure; the inter-textual use of ‘past stories’; allusions to, and uses of, Eastern and Western traditions (e.g. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights); embedded literary criticism; the self-conscious play between narratologist and storyteller, audience and reader; and the conscious interplay of oral storytelling and novelistic realism. Writing at a time when the critic is almost one step ahead of the writer, Byatt must pre-empt or prophetically prefigure their verdicts in order to reconfirm the authority of the writer as storyteller. Byatt’s focus on ‘tales-within-tales’, and on ‘old’ ways of telling stories in ‘The Djinn’, therefore, represents a move away from her traditional understanding of novelistic discourse, as well as acting as a means by which to further investigate this resurgent interest in storytelling in her own writing. Indeed, Byatt draws on her knowledge of literary criticism and uses her position as a writer and critic to stress this very phenomenon. She explains, I wrote a tale called The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye as a tale about this discovery. My heroine is an ageing narratologist, who finds a Djinn in a glass bottle in a hotel room in Istanbul. It is stories within stories again – the Djinn

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and the woman tell each other their lives, as lovers do on meeting, the woman tells tales at conferences as examples, and so on. I knew when I began that the Djinn himself figured both death as an invigorating force, and also the passion for reading tales. Children read stories as though they themselves are immortal. The old read tales knowing that they themselves are finite, that the tales will outlive them. The Djinn is immortal, as the tales are. [. . .] I understood that the tales had power because they were alive everywhere. A myth derives force from its endless repeatability. ‘Originality’ and ‘individuality’, those novelistic aesthetic necessities, were neither here nor there.19

Moving away from the novelistic aspirations of ‘originality’ and ‘individuality’, Byatt recognizes, following Benjamin, that the art of the storyteller lies, instead, in her ability to write stories which can be retold and remembered. This move away from the concept of individual genius is, in fact, liberating for Byatt and for her fiction; it is from this perspective as a re-teller of (fairy) stories that Byatt’s self-conscious placing of her heroine in the frame of the traditional fairy tale operates.

Fairy-tale storyteller-ess ‘The Djinn’ asserts its status as fairy tale in a number of ways, which return us not only to the traditional storyteller, but also to the storyteller as a female, fairy-tale teller. One of the first ways we observe this is through the voice of the narrator. Although largely omniscient, the narrator implicitly points to her status as a female storyteller by beginning her narrative with the traditional opening formula of the fairy tale: Once upon a time when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas, and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy. (DNE 95) (My emphasis)

Although most readers will recognize the opening line and formula of the fairy tale (once upon a time . . . there was a), the images that follow reveal an intricate and skilful ability to mediate between realism and fantasy, the modern world

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and the world of a fabled, storied past. The ‘men and women’ who ‘hurtled through the air on metal wings’ on the one hand, point to mythological time by alluding to the story of Icarus; however, the contemporary reader-listener recognizes the reference to passengers on an aeroplane. Similarly, the images of ‘webbed feet’ and ‘walking on the bottom of the sea’ might bring to mind mermaids and mythical, underwater worlds like Atlantis, but are recognizable to contemporary audiences as scuba divers. Finally, the ‘dates, guavas and passion fruits’ that are reminiscent of tropical islands and that would once have been impossible to imagine in snowy Norway, are in fact a normal part of everyday convenience shopping at a modern-day supermarket. From the first paragraph then, the narrator’s skill as an adept and experienced storyteller is highlighted through her ability to weave these images together in such a way as to literally merge these two worlds, and their respective narrative traditions, together. Indeed, this blending of traditions is continued throughout ‘The Djinn’ in various ways, all of which serve to affirm Byatt’s mastery of her craft and assert her role as storyteller. This is achieved not simply by interweaving images, but through her skilful interplay between novelistic discourse and the formulas and structural devices of traditional fairyand folktales. Indeed, the opening paragraph is one of many instances where the indefinite time and opening formulas of fairy-tale stories are employed, embedding various tales within the main narrative frame, and thus evoking oral storytelling practices. For example: ‘Once upon a time [. . .]’ (DNE 95); ‘The story of Patient Griselda as told by Gillian Perholt, is this [. . .]’ (DNE 108); ‘There was once a young marquis [. . .]’ (DNE 108); ‘I shall tell you the story of the Ethiopian woman [. . .]’ (DNE 244); ‘In the days when camels flew from roof to roof [. . .]’ (DNE 260). However, ‘The Djinn’ also employs modes of narrative discourse which conform to the tenets of the ‘traditional’ novelistic tradition, such as describing the psychology of characters and making clear references to historical time and place. In this way, we see these traditions blend within the fairy tale, bringing together the two figures of novelist and storyteller. This blending of traditions that we observe through the voice of the storyteller-narrator was a conscious aim that Byatt had for ‘The Djinn’, a fact that sheds more light on her relationship to the storyteller. In an essay written about ‘The Djinn’ in 1995, she explains, Fairy stories are related to dreams, which are maybe most people’s first experience of unreal narrative, and to myths. Realism is related to explanations and orderings – the tale of the man in the bar who tells you the story of his

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life, the historian who explains the decisions of generals and the decline of economies. Great novels, I believe, always draw on both ways of telling, both ways of seeing. But because realism is agnostic and sceptical, human and reasonable, I have always felt it was what I ought to do. And yet my impulse to write came, and I know it, from years of reading myths and fairytales under the bedclothes, from the delights and freedoms and terrors of worlds and creatures that never existed.20

Byatt’s concern with the practice of writing is evident, and she admits that the ‘great’ novels she aspired to write came from a predominantly ‘male’ tradition. The impulse that Byatt describes is directly expressed by the storyteller-narrator and echoed in Gillian’s own experiences as a child (DNE 187). In this way, not only are the writer and the storyteller brought together in terms of the oral and written traditions, but these preoccupations are reflected in each of the three authorial figures in the text serving to reinforce the message: Gillian, the semiomniscient narrator-storyteller and Byatt. In ‘The Djinn’, the narrator further asserts her status as storyteller by occasionally rupturing her omniscience with a direct address to the reader, moving from the position of omniscient third to one which includes both a first- and second-person narrative address. One of these instances comes at the beginning of ‘The Djinn’ when we learn that Gillian has been left by her husband for a younger woman, a story that the narrator tells us is so familiar that there is no need for me to recount it to you, you can imagine it very well for yourself. Equally, you can imagine Emmeline Porter for yourself, she has no more to do with this story. She was twenty-six, that is all you need to know, and more or less what you supposed, probably, anyway. (DNE 102)

The informal, conversational tone, achieved by the use of the words ‘probably’ and ‘anyway’, is a direct mimicking of oral speech and echoes the way an oral storyteller interrupts her narrative with various asides in ‘real’ oral storytelling practices. However, this passage points to another significant aspect of the construction of ‘The Djinn’, which serves to further assert its status as fairy tale and returns us to the storyteller. The story begins by highlighting the very construction of stories through a focus on beginnings, middles and endings. The story of Gillian’s husband and his young ‘lover’ may be familiar, but the story of Gillian Perholt as placed within a traditional fairy tale is not: as an ‘older’ woman, Gillian does not conform to the expected traditional heroine of classic fairy tales and, as such, her story is unchartered narrative territory.

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Having long ago met her metaphorical prince and gone off to live ‘happily ever after’, Gillian has now surpassed the traditional ending of a fairy tale. As Gillian’s fairy-tale life story has already had its beginning and middle, the implication is that it is now approaching its inevitable end; however, it surprises us by offering, instead, a new narrative beginning. Beginnings and endings are also reflected in the stories of Gillian’s ex-husband, and his new ‘fairy-tale’ princess, Emmeline, suggesting, not only further stories, but an infinite number of stories of people’s lives, and thus reflecting the cycle of birth, life and death. This focus on beginnings, middles and endings is central to storytelling in general, and to fairy tales in particular, a fact that Byatt deliberately draws on in constructing ‘The Djinn’ both in terms of casting it as a fairy tale and through her use of embedded stories. Byatt recognizes that ‘the excitement of fairy tales’ for fiction writers in general ‘not only feminists, is that they have a beginning, a middle and an end’, a narrative structure that, she says, readers ‘hunger’ for.21 This hunger is perhaps nothing more than that which keeps the reader reading and the listener listening, leading them to the desired closure and resolution which comes with the end of the story. As the immediacy of this relationship is lost to the longer form of the traditional realist novel, by embedding this short structure into a longer form, the contemporary writer brings her audience of readers the more immediate satisfaction of the oral storytelling performance.22 In this way, story and storytelling is placed back into the novel23 form. Byatt’s work not only borrows from literary allusion and intertextuality, but also metaphor. Her first metaphor comes with the idea of flight and leads thematically to the storyteller and to the unspoken battle between male and female storytellers. As noted above, the storyteller-narrator directly talks to the audience in the second person, emphasizing the oral aspect of her tale. But immediately after this, and adopting a more realist mode, she describes the feelings Gillian had as she watched the message come out of the fax machine that told her of her husband’s decision to leave: The fax had been bought for Mr Perholt, an editorial consultant, to work from home when he was let go or made redundant in the banal sense, but its main user was Gillian Perholt, who received E-mail and story variants from narratologists in Cairo and Auckland, Osaka and Port of Spain. Now the fax was hers, since he was gone. And although she was now redundant as a woman, being neither wife, mother, nor mistress, she was by no means redundant as a narratologist, but on the contrary, in demand everywhere. (DNE 103)

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The word redundant is echoed throughout the narrative, and repeated a little later as Gillian heads off into the hazy world of her future. On the plane on the way to her first conference moving ‘up, up, through grey curtains of English rain, a carpet of woolly iron-grey English cloud, a world of swirling vapour’ (DNE 96–7) brings us to the words by John Milton, ‘floating redundant’, and thus to Byatt’s first literary allusion. In Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) this image and the words themselves, ‘floating redundant’, recall Satan who transformed into a mist-vapour and entered the snake when it was sleeping. In order to reassess her life as a woman of 50 moving forward into the late twentieth-century world, Gillian remembers the story of her youth where she conformed to the traditional fairy-tale heroine, a ‘golden-haired white virgin’ (DNE 99), whose introduction to the snake and to temptation, significantly, came through the reading of books (stories), which she thought were ‘insolent and lovely’ (DNE 99). This textual allusion reflects the preoccupations of the text with the female voice and the female intellect. Gillian’s first experience was linked to a seduction by stories and the male (though not human) storyteller – Satan. In Milton’s re-telling of the story of the Fall, Satan is presented as the quintessential storyteller whose stories bring power and knowledge, Speech and Reason, all of which are male attributes that the female storyteller desires. Gillian, therefore, learns (through the story of the Fall) that knowledge comes through stories, through fiction, but rather than seeing the Fall as negative, Gillian sees Satan’s poison, his metaphorical ‘storytelling’, as a gift. This is a gift that she gained before man, a fact that gives her dominion over him. Thus, with the gift of Speech and Reason, in the human realm, woman became a storyteller before man. Moreover, in succeeding to seduce man where Satan failed, she proved that her storytelling powers were more powerful than Satan’s own. In this sense, through the allusion to the story of the Fall, Byatt points to a reinstatement of the female storyteller to fiction. In ‘The Djinn’, intertextuality – which presents itself as a form of retelling – and narrative embedding situate it within the tradition of frame-tale literature and the Nights. Byatt’s use of the Nights, however, draws both on the structural aspects and the content of the frame tale, and on the figure of the storytellernarrator, Scheherazade. As Marie-Pascal Buschini24 has observed, the narrative plays on parallelism and inversion of the frame tale in which Scheherazade’s storytelling is a means to survival. In the original frame story, it was his wife’s infidelity that led to King Shahryar’s disillusionment with woman-kind, to the point that he vowed to kill a virgin every night from then on so that he would never have to fall in love again. It was Scheherazade’s self-sacrifice and her

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subsequent storytelling that cured the king and saved not only her own life but also the lives of all the women who would have come after her. In ‘The Djinn’, it is Gillian’s husband who is unfaithful and Gillian, unlike King Shahryar, is left unable to seek neither vengeance nor any form of comeback. However, Gillian’s story is not unusual in the larger context of ‘the stories of women’s lives’ within which ‘The Djinn’ operates, and this allusion to the Nights serves, once again, to highlight the dominance of men over women. But following the tradition of Scheherazade, ‘The Djinn’ explores how Gillian can still turn to storytelling to find her own means of survival, with or without a man, hence Buschini dubs her a ‘modern Scheherazade’.25 Storytelling, therefore, emerges once again as a means of conquering death, and of survival.

The female storyteller Despite the assertion that we see the storyteller as sitting outside constructs of gender, it is important to mention that this conception is somewhat idealistic. A closer examination of historical representations of the storyteller leads us to observe that most representations of the storyteller are predominantly male.26 As Marina Warner points out, Benjamin never once imagines that his storytellers might be women [. . .] he divides storytellers into stay-at-homers or rovers – tradesmen and agriculturalists, like tailors and the shoemakers who appear in the stories on the one hand; on the other, the seamen who travel far afield adventuring, like the questioning type of hero. He neglects the figure of the spinster, the older woman with her distaff, who may be working in town and country, in one place or on the move, at market or on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, and who has become a generic icon of narrative from the frontispiece of fairytale collections from Charles Perrault onwards.27

Although the female storyteller does have her own specific storyteller personas (pointed to above by Warner), Warner’s attack on Benjamin’s seeming androcentrism in relation to the storyteller may indeed point to a tendency within cultural, historical and academic discourses towards the masculine image. Although this is not inherent in the term storyteller as I mentioned above – and thus is not necessarily intentionally misogynistic – nevertheless, the politics of gender in relation to the position of storyteller as a cultural producer

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and preserver (which is precisely what Byatt’s ‘The Djinn’ is foregrounding) is important to document correctly. In Anne Pellowski’s unique, documentary study of storytelling in the world, the way the word ‘storyteller’ is employed seems on the whole to concur with both my own and Kreilkamp’s notions that the storyteller does not have a specific gender bias. However, on closer inspection, there is substantial, though subtle evidence that the storyteller is most typically associated with the male gender, particularly in the descriptions of the bardic storytellers that Pellowski documents from various countries and traditions from ancient times and through to the Middle Ages and beyond. For example, Pellowski specifically describes a female bard as a ‘curious’28 phenomenon, which might logically lead one to conclude that most accounts of storyteller figures from the Middle Ages and earlier, particularly in the bardic tradition, are speaking of a ‘male’ figure, rather than a female figure. Indeed, the fact that Pellowski makes a specific point of noting that within some of these storyteller types, a storyteller can also be female lends credence to the fact that the female storyteller is unusual or uncommon.29 Perhaps this is simply the result of historical provenance, nevertheless, it is this pointing out of ‘difference’ which, on closer examination of the historical representations of the storyteller, leads us to observe that the majority of representations show a bias towards the male figure. From the figure of the ancient Greek rhapsode and the wise man or trickster-figure of indigenous cultures to the figure of the bard, the Celtic storyteller and the wandering storyteller of African cultures, in the historical conceptualization of the storyteller, it is the male figure that presents the strongest image in the mind and the male figure that, ultimately, dominates. In the folk tradition, however, this picture is somewhat more balanced. Pellowski observes, though not explicitly, that here the female storyteller is more common, particularly in relation to storytelling performed in the home environment, or to children. Indeed, it is within this folk tradition, in the telling of folktales and fairy tales, that women find their place as storytellers where ‘wisdom’ is passed down by family members such as the archetypal ‘old grandmother figure’ – represented in later folk traditions as Old Mother Goose, the spinster, the old woman with the distaff – in a form of ‘family telling’.30 Pellowski records this form of folk-tale and fairy-tale storytelling in a variety of cultures around the world noting that, ‘[s]torytelling in the home is one of the most universal of human experiences’,31 a fact that Benjamin echoes when he says of the fairy tale that is ‘the first tutor of children because it was the first

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tutor of mankind’.32 Indeed, despite the fact that Benjamin does not clearly point to the storyteller as male or female, he nevertheless recognizes the importance of the folk- and fairy-tale tradition for the storyteller and places the storyteller as fairy-tale teller high in the hierarchy of tellers: ‘The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales.’33 However, here again, Pellowski notes that fairy tales, which come out of a tradition of folk storytelling, have been regarded with disdain as early as the times of Emperor Julian (ce 331–363), a trend that has continued to be dominant well into modern times.34 For example, she quotes the Gaelic storyteller-historian, James Delargy who slights the stories told for and by women and children deeming them not as worthy of merit as those told by men at their gatherings.35 Although these are but two examples, they highlight what seems to be the more common perception that it is men that are predominantly seen as storytellers, men in whose hands traditions are created. This perception is further compounded and evidenced by the literary novelistic tradition, which has only in the last century really begun to change. In other words, what this means in terms of storytelling and the storyteller is that whereas male storytellers are powerful figures and are endowed with virtues such as knowledge, reason, prophecy and power, women’s storytelling wisdom comes from spinsters, grandmothers and is brought to us through ‘old wives’ tales and ‘children’s stories’. The question remains, however: to what extent is this a true reflection of women’s contribution to the wealth of culture that has come to us through storytelling, or is it simply a reflection of a badly documented history of oral storytelling traditions? Or, does it, in fact, relate to the larger question of who is placed higher in the hierarchy of cultural producers: man or woman? Academic discourse and writing itself (especially in Western traditions) favours the masculine, and perhaps this is in part a residue of the long history of predominantly male writers (and possibly also storytellers).36 Moreover, it is this ‘male’ version of history which is accountable for the majority of written accounts of documented history, including the history of oral storytelling. In a sense, this is what Warner is pointing to in her attack on Benjamin, though her book From the Beast to the Blonde: Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994) readdresses this mythology by verifying the clear link between folktales and fairy tales and women’s stories. Warner’s vivid historical account of fairy-tale storytellers, powerfully reveals the key role that women played, as well as how they were perceived from the Middle Ages onwards (albeit in the European context), in the oral storytelling tradition, which is itself a repository of a breadth of cultural memory. However, Warner also uncovers the fact that women’s

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stories, and voices, were often negatively represented from this period onwards. In other words, the downplaying of women’s roles and contributions within the storytelling tradition finds its roots in history. During the reformation, for example, Warner explains that women were often associated with ‘gossip’ and ‘were the focus of much male anxiety’, and their chattering tongues were seen as ‘devilish’ or ‘demonic’.37 As evidence of this, she relates a story of a man who had been summoned before the Inquisition for indecency following the distribution of a pamphlet of secular tales in the tradition of tale-telling and eavesdropping, and whose defence was simply that ‘he had only taken down the stories he had heard from the lady storytellers’.38 Warner describes how over the next two centuries ‘the theme of women’s gossip and its dangerous powers grew in intensity’, so that by ‘the seventeenth century, broadsheets denounced women’s rattling tongues (were) associated with curses and spells, with vices of nagging and tale-bearing.’39 In fact, the negative association between women and telling tales was so extreme that she notes, ‘from the same century that saw the development of Mother Goose40 tales, branks or scold’s bridles – contraptions like dog muzzles designed to gag women who had been charged and found guilty of blasphemy and defamation.’41 Over time, it was the ageing woman in particular who became the focus of both the ‘rhetoric and iconography’ of fear about women’s telling. Depictions of women as ‘garrulous crones’, ‘witches’ and the like became prevalent. Eventually, these figures began to creep into the fairy tale. She notes, Both the linguistic link between godmothers and old gossip, and the social link between ageing women and secret, wicked powers, are crucial in the world of the fairy tale; wresting control of that evil tongue occupied the energies of the pioneers of nursery tales.42

One of these pioneers of the fairy tale was the French writer Charles Perrault (1628–1703) whose transcription and reinterpretation of the fairy tale also accounted for the subsequent solidification of this negative representation of the female figure in the written tradition. Perrault was writing in a climate where fairy-tale-telling was rife. Ironically, he formed a reputation as the pioneer of written fairy-tale collections, but the truth was that ‘he was greatly outnumbered, and in some instances also preceded, by women aficionadas of contes de fées whose work has now faded from view’.43 As Warner explains, the fairy tale was a form that quintessentially represented female stories: The matter of fairy tale reflects such lived experience, with a slant towards the tribulations of women, and especially young women of marriageable age; the

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telling of the stories, assuming the presence of a Mother Goose, either as a historical source, or a fantasy of origin, gains credibility as a witness’s record of lives lived, of characters known, and shapes and expectations in a certain direction. Fairy tale offers a case where the very contempt for women opened an opportunity for them to exercise their wit and communicate their ideas.44

The example of Perrault was echoed in other male European writers – for example, notably, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm – who also became the transcribers and ‘rewriters’ of fairy-tale collections, and this was the infancy of what has now become known as the ‘literary fairy tale’.45 For Warner, it is precisely the writerly tradition, one achieved through the printed word that has contributed to the obscuring of the women storytellers who traditionally contributed to the oral storytelling tradition of fairy and folktales. Particularly in Europe, it is these male authors whose names are still associated with fairy-tale collections, a fact that powerfully and incorrectly aligns the tradition of the fairy tale to male storytellers. ‘The Djinn’ follows the tradition of the fairy tale as a genre for women’s stories, in the fact that it provides this opportunity for the narrator to tell the story of Gillian Perholt, who equally re-tells and reinterprets the stories of women as they have been presented in literature in her role as narratologist. Byatt’s choice of the name ‘Perholt’ – a homophone of Perrault – and her placing of ‘The Djinn’ within the tradition of the fairy tale, therefore, is a deliberate gesture whose overall polemic is to reassert the role of woman within the storytelling tradition thus reclaiming her place as female and gendered storyteller. In writing into the literary tradition of men the right of women to be tellers of tales, and in asserting the tradition of women who have contributed to the storytelling tradition throughout the ages, Byatt emphasizes the status of the storyteller as a woman: storyteller as storyteller-ess.

Silence, obedience, wishing and storytelling It is this negative representation of the older woman, the older woman as crone, witch and hag, that Byatt draws on in ‘The Djinn’. Her polemic, however, rests in the reinterpretation of this figure through the very medium that negatively represented her. As such, in ‘The Djinn’, the traditional representation of the older female in fairy tale is reversed. The storyteller-narrator recasts Gillian, who in a traditional fairy tale would play either a ‘godmother, or witch in tales with younger heroines’,46 into the role of a now older heroine, thus affording her the

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possibility for new stories. However, this is not immediately apparent. Following the traditional structures of the fairy tale, the hag, a representation of Gillian’s ‘redundancy’ within the world of the fairy tale, rears its ugly head three times. Gillian has to overcome the ‘hag’ in order to move through her story and recover her own narrative possibilities. The figure of the hag, who appears to Gillian in the form of a vision, reflects the theme of narrative death that links the story’s theme to the Nights (as we observed in Barth’s Last Voyage). However, ‘The Djinn’ not only reflects the crafting of Scheherazade’s tale in its structuring, but also and more importantly, it reflects the frame-story of the Nights themselves: that telling not only equals living but is there to stave of death, which is the end of the story, and (as we learnt from Todorov)47 of Gillian’s narrative life. On one level, Byatt’s heroine, therefore, mirrors Scheherazade’s fight against death: she must tell stories to stay alive and overcome her impending narrative death. However, on another, we have a sense that despite the sharing of destinies, Scheherazade is in a stronger position to keep death at bay (or the end of the story) because youth, beauty and seductive power supplement her storytelling abilities. Gillian, as the older woman, haunted by the image of the hag, has none of these things and, despite the fact that ‘her business was storytelling’, she proclaims that: she was no ingenious queen in fear of the shroud brought in with the dawn, nor was she a naquibolmalek to usher the shah through the gates of sleep, nor an ashik, lover-minstrel singing songs of Mehmet the Conqueror and the sack of Byzantium, nor yet a holy dervish in short skin trousers and skin skull-cap, brandishing axe or club and making its shadow terrible. She was no meddah, telling incredible tales in the Ottoman court of the coffee-houses by the market. She was merely a narratologist, a being of secondary order, whose days were spent hunched in great libraries scrying, interpreting, decoding, the fairy-tales of childhood and the vodka-posters of the grown-up world. (DNE 95–6)

Unlike the prestigious role she ascribes to the oral storytellers of legend – significantly gendered as female by the use of the pronoun ‘she’ – Gillian may at this early point in her narrative, deem herself as narratologist to be inferior, a ‘being of ‘secondary order’. Despite the possibilities thrown up by her position as protagonist in her own fairy tale, she does not recognize her own power, or see the double meaning in the line ‘her business was storytelling’, which could indicate her role as either narratologist and/or storyteller. Gillian’s distinctiveness to the representations of women in traditional fairy tales and

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folktales is highlighted by her very status as narratologist. Significantly, the narratologist is self-consciously constrasted against the figure of the storyteller who takes primary importance in the hierarchy of orders. The text, therefore, presents the idea that Gillian is knowledgeable about stories even if she herself cannot (as yet) tell them. Gillian’s intricate knowledge of the workings of narrative construction, and the way women’s stories have been represented in literature, place her in a superior position to the majority of female roles in traditional fairy tales, despite her being ‘secondary’ to the storyteller. Furthermore, the evocation of storyteller figures from the East – the Turkish storyteller of the coffee houses (meddah) and the bardic troubadour (ashik) who was renowned for singing love poetry in countries such as Turkey, Iran and as far as Azerbaijan – reveals an intricate knowledge of the history of the storyteller by the omniscient narrator, urging us to reflect on the relationship between these figures and that of Gillian, and the omniscient (female) narrator. By evoking these storyteller figures the storytellernarrator brings them into narrative existence and into Gillian’s story. In this way, they become narrative possibilities for Gillian, and point to a potential transformation, which we know from other fairy-tale heroines – Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty – is an expected formula in fairy tales. The ‘quest’ of the story therefore, is not only to find out what Gillian’s story is and could be (the possibilities of her story), but to see whether she can move into a position where she herself can create it. The narrative, therefore, presents its own solution: in order to save herself from narrative death, Gillian must move from a being of secondary order – a narratologist who decodes stories – to one of primary order: a storyteller who has the power to shape and (re) tell stories to their own end. Particularly as Gillian has no familiar story from which she can derive and ending (being an ageing woman and not a youthful princess), the only way to find the end of her own story is to tell it herself – as a storyteller-ess. Gillian’s first conference, in Ankara, titled ‘Stories of Women’s Lives’, a ‘pantechnicon title to make space for everyone, from every country, from every genre, from every time’ (DNE 105), is described as ‘a bazaar where stories and ideas were exchanged and changed’ (DNE 106). These descriptions echo the scene of the ‘marketplace’ where Eastern storytellers would tell stories, and thus place Gillian in the same tradition as their respective oral storytellers, as the following nineteenth-century account reveals: In a Persian town they are to be met with in every street. In open sites, such as are often found near market-places, great sheds are erected, open on all sides and

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furnished with rows of steps capable of seating three to four hundred persons squatting on their heels. In front of the audience is a platform from whence a succession of storytellers repeat their stories to a succession of listeners from morning to night.48

It is, therefore, notably, at the conference where Gillian takes on the role of storyteller when she tells her first story about a female character, a point that is emphasized by the following introduction: ‘The story of Patient Griselda, as told by Gillian Perholt’ (DNE 108) (My emphasis). The story of Griselda that Gillian retells is taken from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1483), yet another frame narrative containing storieswithin-stories, which mirrors the structure of ‘The Djinn’. The story of Griselda sheds light onto the frame narrative – Gillian’s story – as well as to the theme of the conference, which is to tell ‘the stories of women’s lives’, and how they have been depicted in literature. Gillian’s retelling is historically consistent and provides a counter-discourse to the exclusively male narrators of the story of Patient Griselda, reclaiming it as the product of exclusively ‘female’ narrators: Gillian, the (female) narrator of ‘The Djinn’, and the extra-textual authoress (A. S. Byatt). The tradition of retelling thus places Gillian in the role of storyteller and, as representative of Todorov’s model of stories-within-stories, it reinforces Byatt’s own storytelling prowess, as both critic-narratologist and writerly storyteller. For example, we can observe: Byatt tells the tale of The omni-present narrator telling the tale of Gillian Perholt telling the tale of Patient Griselda told by Chaucer told by the clerk of Oxford told by Petrach told by Boccaccio

Gillian’s account of the story of Patient Griselda is an interpretation of the Clerk of Oxford’s tale. It was told in retort to a tale told by the Wife of Bath, who, representative of the ‘garrulous’ and ‘tale-telling’ women of medieval times, tells a tale of women’s superiority over the husband who is ‘a Clerk of Oxford’, symbolized by the burning of his book – a symbol of Knowledge and Reason. The Clerk of Oxford’s version of Griselda counter-acts this image of woman as ‘superior’ to man: Patient Griselda represents the silent, obedient wife. In fact, this representation of woman was iconic in medieval sensibilities

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and counteracted the fear that men had over women’s storytelling, of women’s ‘wicked tongues’, which they saw as inherently evil.49 Warner describes how silence, obedience and discretion were thus seen as essentially feminine virtues, to the point that ‘The Silent Woman was an accepted ideal’.50 From the fourteenth century and beyond this ideal persisted and was reflected in late sixteenth-century morality as Warner observes: The virtue of Prudence, portrayed as a good housewife, wears a padlock on her mouth [. . . Similarly] the Wise Woman, a paragon compounded of classical and biblical morality, wears a padlock on her lips to signify obedience and discretion, and declares that she would rather die, like Lucretia, than dishonour her husband.51

The implicit storytelling ‘competition’ between the Clerk of Oxford and the Wife of Bath in Chaucer, therefore, enacts the battle between male and female wills which serve to reinforce the main themes of ‘The Djinn’. Hence, it is symbolic that Gillian as another female narrator re-tells this story, and reinterprets its message for her (listening) audience, an audience which is echoed in the reading audience of ‘The Djinn’ and in the omniscient narration of the storyteller-ess, A. S. Byatt. The story of Patient Griselda tells of a beautiful peasant girl who is selected by a rich lord named Walter as his bride-to-be, but who on their wedding day demands that she promises complete obedience to him as a kind of ‘contractual agreement’. Although Griselda agrees to this, her ‘patience’ is tested by Walter in a number of ways which can only be described as ‘extreme’ to modern sensibilities. One of these acts of obedience sees Walter take away and allegedly ‘kill’ both Griselda’s (and his own) children without even as much as a protestation from Griselda. Another incident takes place years later, when having lost her youth, Walter cruelly takes away Griselda’s status as queen (literally stripping her of her rich clothes) and places her in the role of servant, forcing her to help prepare him for a marriage to a new, and younger bride – a curious echo of Gillian’s story. Throughout all these acts, Griselda obeys her husband Walter, exhibiting patience and silence, reflecting, for medieval sensibilities, the (feminine) virtues of Prudence and obedience. In her reading of the story Gillian makes a point of highlighting interpretative instances in the narrator’s (the Clerk’s) and Chaucer’s (the writer’s) narration. For example, she notes: ‘Chaucer takes care to tell us, that (Griselda) showed great qualities of judgement’ (DNE 111); ‘It is interesting [. . .] here that the Clerk of Oxford disassociates himself from his protagonist, and says he cannot see why

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this testing seemed to be necessary’ (DNE 112). This is significant, as it highlights her own interpretative re-telling of the story as a female narrator. However, it is when she comes to the ending of the story and to her own interpretation that the hag appears. Gillian, symbolically, loses the power of speech, thus echoing Griselda: she sees a grey woman, a shadow with withered skin, ‘a flat-breasted’ ghoul with a ‘windy hole that was its belly and womb’ (DNE 118). The womb, a symbol of the creative power of woman is, notably, empty. The hag stops her speaking and from telling her story and turns her into ‘a pillar of salt’ (DNE 118) where her voice is lost to its audience and is useless. ‘This is what I am afraid of, thought Gillian Perholt’ (DNE 118). Interestingly, the image of the crone and the hag that Gillian sees can be traced back to medieval times and reflects Gillian’s loss of speech. Warner explains how set against the virtue of Obedience, ‘traditionally represented by iconic representation of Silence’,52 was speech, which represented unruliness and disobedience. In medieval times, speech, or a lack of compliance, led to decay whereby ‘decrepitude enciphered ugliness, ugliness unloveliness, unloveliness unwomanliness, unwomanliness infertility: a state of being against nature’.53 As a result, ‘to look fair and speak fair are linked to feminine virtues’ and, conversely, ‘to look foul and speak foul’ evokes the cursing, ugliness of the hag. But it is the womb and motherhood that redeems woman both from the sinfulness of her ‘tongue’ and ‘speech’ and from her sexuality, a belief that is echoed in the First Epistle to Timothy: ‘A woman ought not to speak [. . .] Nevertheless she will be saved by childbearing’ (1 Tim. 2.15).54 Through the story of Griselda, therefore, the reality of the medieval past is brought to the present and is ever-present. The idea of the obedience to the husband is reflected in the image of three scarved women who are part of the audience at the conference and who, in Gillian’s vision, reappear occluded by the ‘cavernous form’ (DNE 118) of the hag. A little time before she makes her keynote address one of the women is asked why she wears the veil, and her reply points to obedience and silence, to an acceptance of male power: ‘My father and my fiancé say it is right [. . .] and I agree’ (DNE 108).55 Moreover, the image of the flat-breasted hag devoid of womb that Gillian sees, which stops her from speaking, signifies the loss of youth, her obedience to her husband and the fact that she cannot be redeemed by motherhood any longer. The familiarity of this story, one of dominance of man over woman, and its endless repeatability over hundreds of years of women’s stories (and lives), is what culminates in Gillian seeing the vision of the hag before her and what stuns her into silence.

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However, Gillian regains her power of speech and turns her condemnation onto Walter. Although the story ends with a reward of sorts – Walter reveals that the new bride is in fact her lost daughter and Griselda is reconciled with her children and reinstated as lordly wife – Gillian’s powerful interpretation of the ending of the story to her listening audience reveals that: The peculiar horror of patient Griselda does not lie in the psychological terror of incest or even of age. It lies in the narration of the story and Walter’s relation to it. The story is terrible because Walter has assumed too many positions in the narration he is hero, villain, destiny, God and narrator – there is no play in this tale. (DNE 120)

The cumulative message of Gillian’s retelling of the Griselda story is that the act of narration, or storytelling, that has for centuries been dominated by men in relation to women’s stories and which has led to the suppression of female voices, needs to be readdressed by making room for female voices, for female storytellers. It is precisely through the act of storytelling, of re-telling and reinterpreting these stories, that ‘the stories of women’s lives in fiction (which) are the stories of stopped energies’ (DNE 121) can be renewed. Gillian’s speaking out, her voicing of the interpretation, acts as a powerful symbol of survival and freedom and asserts her status as an ‘independent woman’ (DNE 205) who no longer needs to be subservient and obedient to men. Gillian has assumed both the role of storyteller and narratologist, but also has significantly gendered these positions as female, moving us to construe these as storytelleress and narratologist-ess.

Storytelling and the djinn The hag appears to Gillian a few more times throughout the narrative and at each turn, Gillian is faced with narrative death, experienced as ‘a strange stoppage of her own life’ (DNE 167). We are told that Gillian ‘struggled with the passions of real stories’ (DNE 171) because she cannot identify with any of the female figures. Thus, with no stories available to her, she does not know how to continue with her own story, and find her own narrative possibilities. But the hag’s power seems to wane with the introduction in the narrative of a djinn, a new agent of ‘fate’, who emerges from a bottle she buys in the market in Istanbul and who grants her new narrative possibilities. Representative of fairy-tale structures, the djinn grants her three wishes, to which the djinn adds the ending line: ‘If there

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is anything you desire’ (DNE 195). This indirect question is echoed throughout the narrative acting as a kind of leitsätze,56 taking us back to the story of ‘Patient Griselda’ but also forward into the stories which are subsequently exchanged between Gillian and the djinn. As Maack points out, When later narrative elements inserted in the tale speak of wishing and ask ‘what women most desire’, they do so in reference to the contest between husband and wife in ‘Patient Griselda’. In giving his own account, Chaucer’s clerk had already echoed the Wife of Bath’s tale, which asked and answered that very question: What thing is that women most desyren? .… .… .… .… .… .… .… .… .… . Wommen desyren to have sovereyntee As wel over hir housbond as hir love, And for to been maistrie him above.57

Maack reveals that this question plays on a further chain of stories – she notes, ‘In John Gower’s “Tale of Florent”, in the Confessio Amantis, and in “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell”, – from the medieval past all of which tellingly, give the same answer: “sovereignty”.’58 This notion of sovereignty in the relations between men and women is what the larger frame of ‘The Djinn’, and within it all the embedded frame tales, are concerned with: that the stories of women’s lives, have been concerned with authority and power exerted by men. In the process of finding out what Gillian desires, or her ‘wish-fulfilment’ which will lead to the end of her story, she and the djinn begin to exchange stories: hence, more narrative embedding. This story exchange between Gillian and the djinn once again highlights the thematic concerns relating to male and female power and with each wish, Gillian’s narrative moves forward towards its resolution. The djinn reveals that he has been released to a variety of ‘women’ over his century-old existence, to whom he acted as a kind of narrative muse. With each release and each story he tells, we are fed more stories of ‘women’s lives’. The first story the djinn tells Gillian the story of the Queen of Sheba, another strong, independent female figure who was married to King Solomon (Suleiman in ‘The Djinn’). It is in the Bible where we first meet the story of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. Warner explains that in the Book of Kings we learn that when Sheba and Solomon meet, Sheba ‘communed all that was

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in her heart’59 and Solomon reciprocates by sharing all his knowledge with her. Solomon, as ‘the wisest man on earth’ gives her all his knowledge but as Warner goes on to note, it is ‘by virtue of her contact with Solomon (that) Sheba could be accounted wise. However, [. . .] she is still rather less wise that the wise king, a messenger of his knowledge rather than an originator.’60 In the Islamic tradition, Solomon’s wisdom is seen as a type of wizardry. Warner explains: Attended by djinns and magic animals, he can work wonders and enchantments greater than any other king, so, when he orders the queen to come to him ‘submissively’, and she is reluctant, he uses his prodigious powers of goety, or (black) magic, and performs various tricks to bring her to him.61

Sheba’s story, as related by the djinn, echoes these two depictions from history and, in turn, follows the stories of women before her in the novella. Sheba, despite her renowned independence, cannot resist temptation in the form of King Sulieman. Despite setting him formidable tasks – ‘to find a particular thread of red silk in the whole palace, to guess the secret Name of the djinn her mother, to tell her what women most desire’ (DNE 211) – the djinn relates that as ‘a great magician’ (DNE 211) he won her over, remembering that ‘when he came, I saw that I was lost, for she desired him’ (DNE 210). Sheba, for all her knowledge, wisdom and beauty, still succumbs to male will and is placed into the predetermined fate of a female in women’s stories. Similarly, the story of the djinn’s second mistress, Zefir, follows suit. Zefir, ‘a great reader of tales and histories’ (DNE 222) who ‘wished to be wise and learned’ (DNE 225) and to whom the djinn taught much knowledge is – mathematics, astronomy, languages, poetry, history, philosophy (DNE 225). Zefir succumbs to her nature as mother and wishes in the end she had never met the djinn, a wish which subsequently comes true, and which, in turn, implies that she also loses all the knowledge she gained from him. When the djinn finally asks Gillian for her own (hi)story, she initially replies in a confident tone, ‘I am a teacher. In a university. I was married and now I am free. I travel the world in aeroplanes and talk about storytelling’ (DNE 231), thus presenting herself as knowledgeable. However, although Gillian’s position echoes the knowledge and wisdom of the women from the past, when the djinn asks, ‘tell me your story’, we are told: ‘A kind of panic overcame Dr Perholt. It seemed to her that she had no story’ (DNE 231). Gillian, at this point, cannot tell her life in terms of a fairy tale, she is merely a character in it, and thus subject to a character’s fate.

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Gillian begins narrating the only ‘reality’ she knows, imitating the storytelling voice of conventional realism. She tells the djinn about the position of women in the world in which she lives, a world which, surprisingly, does not differ in many aspects from that of the women in the past: ‘We were a generation when there was something shameful about being an unmarried woman, a spinster – though we were all clever, like Zefir, my friends and I, we all had this greed for knowledge – we were scholars –‘ (DNE 238). Like Sheba and Zefir, intelligence and knowledge did not stop Gillian and her female peers from being subjected to the laws of marriage and motherhood, and implicitly, from being subjected to the will of men. Gillian says: ‘It is because I am a woman, I cannot get out of here, I must sit here and wait for my fate, if only I were not a woman I could go out and do something’ (DNE 248). Gillian then admits to the fact that at the wishing pillar in Haghia Sophia which she had visited with her colleague Orhan earlier in her tour of Istanbul, she had wished not to be a woman. This curious wish to change sex is interesting in terms of her empowerment and in terms of her role as storyteller. Gillian does not really want to be a man, but instead wants to be freed from the imposed slavery of womanhood: obedience, fertility, sex. Gillian’s story calls for women, at any point in their lives, to be able to move outside of these predetermined roles, to have narrative possibilities beyond these roles. However, the djinn, true to the storytelling tradition, is unimpressed with Gillian’s realistic, ‘novelistic’ narrative, complaining, ‘your stories are strange, glancing things. They peter out, they have no shape’ (DNE 242). Gillian’s reply – ‘That is where a storyteller would end it, in my country’ (DNE 242) – reinforces the belief that the literary mode of realism is not sufficient to express the reality of women’s stories. In order to be able to move into the role of storyteller-ess, the powerful, female shaper of her own narrative, she must learn how to tell fairy tales, to believe in a new kind of fairy story which can provide her with new narrative possibilities for women’s stories. In this way, Gillian shows that she must rediscover the voice of the female storyteller, the teller of fairy tales and the knowledgeable reader of histories and stories. ‘The Djinn’ emerges as a powerful example of this new form of writing – a writing which encompasses both traditions realism and fairy tales – and places the narrator, and Byatt of a ‘new’ and powerful female storyteller. True to the conventions and formula of the traditional fairy tale, Gillian’s final transformation into storyteller-ess emerges when, on her return to England, she discovers that a wish she had made by the statute of Artemis has come true: she is to give the keynote lecture at the conference in Toronto, which is tellingly

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titled, ‘Wish-fulfilment and Narrative Fate: some aspects of wish-fulfilment as a narrative device’ (DNE 257). Primarily, at the conference, the question moves from the larger question ‘what do women most desire?’, to the implied question of ‘can characters in a fairy-tale escape their Fate?’ In other words, can Gillian break out of her position as ‘hag’ in her own fairy tale and enter into the role of princess? Or is the ending rather a different, new story, a story of her own wishing? Gillian, as narratologist, explains, Characters in fairytales are subject to Fate and enact their fates. Characteristically they attempt to change this fate by magical intervention in its workings, and characteristically too, such magical intervention only reinforces the control of the Fate which waited for them, which is perhaps simply the fact that they are mortal and return to dust. (DNE 258)

If Gillian is interpreting her own story as narratologist, then she is explaining that despite the djinn, despite the wishes, she ultimately cannot change anything. We, therefore, learn: ‘The emotion we feel in fairytales when the characters are granted their wishes is a strange one. We feel the possible leap of freedom – I can have what I want – and the perverse certainty that this will change nothing; that Fate is fixed’ (DNE 259). This dichotomy between Fate and Freedom is reflected in the story of Gillian which began when her husband left her, with her selfdubbed ‘redundancy’. If this is a story about power, then, what power is being described? Is it power over man, or power over men’s stories or both? Gillian’s answer comes through the telling of another story, which we are told was being manipulated by the will/wish of the djinn. This is a story of a power relationship, the story of a man and a wishing-ape. A fisherman pulls a monkey out of the sea, and the monkey must serve him and grant his wishes, but with every wish he makes the monkey shrink and come visibly closer to death. In the lecture, the figure of death rears its ugly head once again. The question of ‘what do we most desire?’ is brought into contemporary reality by its relation to Freud. Gillian tells us, ‘“the aim of all life is death,” said Freud, telling his creation story in which the creation strives to return to the state before life was breathed into it’ (DNE 268). In terms of Gillian’s story and the story of the djinn, this ultimately means that they wish to be set free: free to live outside their own stories, which is their link to creation. Naturally, then, as Maack observes, While rephrasing the story in which the fisherman takes pity on the monkey and allows him to make a wish, Gillian finds out that this tale determines the structure of her own action. Like the fisherman, she too gives her third wish, and it is this wish that sets the djinn free.62

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Gillian’s story (the frame story) is a culmination and continuation of all the women’s stories that have come before, all of which, in some way, have been governed by their Fates, as women. However, Gillian’s transformation into a woman who is now able to claim power over all the narrative voices, like Walter, is complete. Hence she confidently asserts, ‘My name is Gillian Perholt. [. . .] I am an independent woman, a scholar, I study tale-telling and narratology’ (DNE 205). The very act of speaking out her own position in the story places her in a position of power and, at the same time, asserts her position as a storyteller-ess. This transformation is echoed in the reply of the djinn, who calls her by a different name: Djil-yan Peri-han’ (DNE 206). ‘Djil-yan’ moves her to an equal pegging with the magical wish-fulfiller, the djinn, implying that she is now able to grant wishes herself; and ‘Perihan’, the Turkish for ‘Queen of the Fairies’, implies she has a mastery of the fairy tale (in other words, the story we are reading). Gillian’s last wish is to act in her new-found and powerful role as a wish-granter herself: ‘I wish you could have whatever you wish for – that this last wish may be your wish’ (DNE 270). By returning the wish to the source of magical intervention, she allows the djinn to become his own creation: to have his own story outside narrative expectations. It is in this way that Gillian escapes her own narrative fate. At the same time, she also affords this opportunity to herself: she has broken free from both the constraints of youth (the princess) and the old age (the hag) and found a new story. Gillian’s orally told academic paper, which ends her own story as well as the story of ‘The Djinn’, serves the dual purpose of transforming both her own narrative (as a woman) and the understanding of the narratives of women for the audience of listeners (on both an intra- and extra-textual level). Equally, her position as a secondary order being, a narratologist, moves into, and sits alongside, the position that Scheherazade holds at the beginning of the narrative: the primary position of storyteller – and thus the creator of fictions. By encompassing both positions, Byatt as a gendered storyteller-ess and narratologist-ess is speaking to an audience that not only encompasses that elusive ‘general’ reader of ‘popular’ fiction, but also speaks narrative theory to the ‘critic’ as well. However, Byatt’s fairy tale is neither pitched against men or male writers per se nor is her discourse directly against male discourse. Instead, Byatt sees literature as a space which is not subject to the ‘gender’ of the author, or the storyteller. She says herself: ‘I have always had a romantic idea that the writer or the artist was, as Coleridge and Virginia Woolf said, androgynous.’63 Although she is a woman, she does not want to be classified as a ‘woman’ writer, a classification which places her in a group of ‘otherness’. Instead, she demands that her fiction, her stories are judged as stories in themselves and on

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their own merit. It is from this perspective that her status as an authoritative cultural producer and interpreter is achieved, through her position as writer, storyteller and intellectual, who happens to be a woman. Byatt seeks equality within the literary landscape, and paradoxically, by gendering the storyteller and narratologist in this literary fairy tale, seeks to assert a woman’s position as equal to man’s, and to return the storyteller and the author to their inherent non-gendered meanings.

Notes 1 See Introduction, footnote 3. 2 A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories (London: Vintage, 1995). All subsequent references to the story ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ will be abbreviated as ‘The Djinn’. All in-text references to the story abbreviated as follows: DNE. All the stories in the collection have appeared before in other sources. ‘The Glass Coffin’ and ‘Gode’s Story’ appeared in Byatt’s novel Possession; ‘The Story of the Eldest Princess’ was part of a collection of fairy stories for adults called Caught a Story (1992); ‘Dragon’s Breath’ (1992) had been commissioned by the ‘Scheherazade 2001 Foundation’, and an abridged version of it was read in Sarajevo. 3 Nicolas Tredell, Conversations with Critics (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994), 66. 4 Ivan Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 8. 5 Kreilkamp quotes a passage from Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman to highlight this: ‘If the Queen’s looking glass speaks with the King’s voice, how do its perpetual kingly admonitions affect the Queen’s own voice? Since his is the chief voice she hears, does the Queen try to sound like the King, imitating his tone, his inflections, his phrasing, his point of view? Or does she ‘talk back’ to him in her own vocabulary, her own timbre, insisting on her own viewpoint? We believe that these are the basic questions feminist literary criticism – both theoretical and practical – must answer . . .’ Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), qtd in Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, 15. 6 Ibid. 7 This is Kreilkamp’s term. See Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, 8. 8 This is particularly apparent in Byatt’s novel Possession (1990), where she boasts that she employed these techniques to prove that she ‘could do it’. She says in an

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interview for New York Times Magazine, ‘I knew people would like it. It is the only one I’ve written to be liked, and I did it partly to show off.’ See Mira Stout, ‘What Possessed A. S. Byatt?’ New York Times Magazine (1991): 14. A. S. Byatt, Still Life (London: Vintage, 2003), 343. Byatt has written a book of criticism on Irish Murdoch which was published in 1965. See A. S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965). This book of criticism has been updated and revised to a new edition published in 1987. A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (London: Vintage, 1990), 32–3. For a reading of fairy-tale motifs in Byatt’s fiction see Elizabeth Wanning Harries, ‘“Ancient Forms”: Myth, Fairy Tale, and Narrative in A. S. Byatt’s Fiction’, in Stephen Benson (ed.), Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008), 74–97. Margaret Reynolds and Jonathan Noakes, A. S. Byatt: Possession: A Romance, Angels and Insects, A Whistling Woman (London: Vintage, 2004), 5. Annegret Maack, ‘Wonder-Tales Hiding a Truth: Retelling Tales in “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”’, in Alexa Alfer and Michael J. Noble (eds), Imagining the Real: Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 123. Sharon Monteith, Jenny Newman and Pat Wheeler, Contemporary British and Irish Fiction: An Introduction through Interviews (London: Arnold, 2004), 40. A. S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), 123–50. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 131. Byatt, On Histories, 131–2. This essay is found on the following website and appears on a drop-down menu on the left-hand side of the page. It has the note at the bottom, ‘Written for Insel Verlag, 1995’. See A. S. Byatt, ‘Fairy Stories: The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.’ http://www.asbyatt.com/Onherself.aspx. Tredell, Conversations, 59. ‘The Djinn’ is best described as a long short story or a novella. In the collection of stories it is the longest of the five, and constitutes more than half of the book. I am aware that this is not a ‘novel’ but a ‘novella’, though what I am describing still applies. Marie-Pascale Buschini, ‘Les Mille et Une Nuits d’une Narratologue: “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” d’A. S. Byatt’, Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines 19 (2000): 13. My translation from the French. Buschini, Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines, 15. I have not included the fictional storyteller, Scheherazade, in this conceptualization, partly due to the fact that she is fictional and does not represent historical representations of the storyteller that are based on real tellers.

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27 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage Random House, 1994), 22. 28 Anne Pellowski, The World of Storytelling (expanded and rev. edn. Bronx: The H. W. Wilson Company: 1990), 42. 29 For example, Pellowski mentions a female bard in the Ethiopian tradition, a mungerash and in the west African tradition, the tīggiwīt. See Pellowski, The World of Storytelling, 42–3. 30 Pellowski, The World of Storytelling, 4. 31 Ibid., 67. 32 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’. 1969 1st Shocken edn. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 2007), 102. 33 Ibid., 11. 34 Pellowski, The World of Storytelling, 66–7. 35 Ibid., 67. 36 Indeed, I could be accused of reinforcing this myself, by the very fact that, for the most part, when referring to the storyteller throughout this book I have been using the pronoun ‘he’. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, I have chosen to use the pronoun ‘he’ partly due to the fact that it best reflects the gender of the writers I have read in the book, but more so, that an incorporation of both pronouns throughout the text in the form of ‘s/he’ and ‘his/her’ would disrupt the flow of the text for the reader. Nevertheless, I recognize that this could be contestable and does, inescapably, put emphasis on the male gender. 37 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage Random House, 1994), 35. 38 Ibid., 36. 39 Ibid., 39. 40 Warner explains that Mother Goose is a symbol of the ‘immemorial storyteller’ who is described as ‘a figure of fun, a foolish ignorant woman, a typical purveyor of old wives’ tales’. However, by the eighteenth century she became more and more associated with morality and instructing children, becoming a kind of ‘Sibyl-Nurse’ figure. See Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 79. 41 Ibid., 39. 42 Ibid., 48. 43 Ibid., xii. 44 Ibid., xix. 45 The literary fairy tale is essentially a genre which developed from the oral fairy tale. For a history of the fairy tale see chapter 1 of Jack Zipes. When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2007), 1–32.

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46 Caroline Webb, ‘Forming Feminism: Structure and Ideology in Charades and “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”’, Hecate 29.1 (2003): 139. 47 I discuss Todorov in Chapter 6 on Barth. However, Byatt also references Todorov in ‘The Djinn’ (DNE 256). 48 R. Heath, ‘Storytelling in All Ages’, Leisure Hour 34 (1885): 1999ff; 273ff. Qtd in Pellowski, The World of Storytelling, 78. 49 Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 29. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 32–4. 52 Ibid., 44. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Kathleen Renk’s reading of ‘The Djinn’ explores feminisim as represented in Byatt’s novella focusing in particular on the novella’s depiction of third-world women such as the scarved women in the above scene. Renk makes the pertinent point that along with the other references to the East such as ‘the erotic and exoticized djinn’ the tale displays a ‘blatant orientalism’, one which Renk sees as ultimately ‘fail[ing] to comprehend that gender is shaped by nationalism, political struggle against colonialism and globalization, and religion.’ Renk notes that ‘while Byatt’s orientalism seems obvious’, and that ‘her intention to draw on the Arabian Nights may have had some merit, since the original Nights were stories that Scheherazade told to save women from death [. . .], she differentiates Byatt’s tale from the original stating that ‘it does not save women from death but views third-world women’s lives as coincident with death.’ Here the link between the veil and the hag demonstrate this. Renk thus reads Byatt’s feminism in ‘The Djinn’ as ‘myopic’ and representative of a first-world feminist view rather than a more broad and global feminism that shows understanding towards cultures such as those of the Middle East and Asia whose feminist polemic rests less (and not solely) on gaining first-world individual rights for women, but collective rights. Although I argue that Byatt’s polemic is centred on the right of women to stand alongside men as equal, the intellectual autonomy which Byatt seeks as cultural producer is in many ways culturally specific and does seem to represent a firstworld, Western-centric feminist perspective (particularly if, as Renk explores, we analyse the depitictions of non-Western women in the novel). If Byatt is positing herself as a ‘universal’ rather than ‘local’ storyteller-ess, who is speaking for all women around the globe through a re-writing/telling of women’s stories, although well-meaning, in the end, there is an argument here that she fails to speak to and for all. See Kathleen Williams Renk, ‘Myopic Feminist Individuality in A. S. Byatt’s Arabian Nights’ Tale: “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”’, Journal of International Women’s Studies 8.1 (2006): 114–24.

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56 The term leitwortstil (leading word style), coined by Martin Buber and Franz Rozenzweig to apply to biblical narrative, designates the ‘purposeful repetition of words [. . .] or word-root’ in a literary piece in order to express a motif or theme important to the given story. The repetition creates a ‘dynamic’ within the text and through its use of the combinations of sounds ‘a kind of movement’ occurs, like ‘waves moving back and forth between words.’ David Pinault finds evidence of this and goes on to extend Buber’s model to include leitsätze (leading sentences). Pinault argues that these motif words or sentences, can ‘accent relationships among events within a story but can also demarcate a framed minor narrative at both beginning and end and distinguish the tale from the surrounding major narrative.’ In ‘The Djinn’, ‘If there is anything you desire’ is in this sense a leitsätze. This is also true of the questions ‘What’s the point of stories that aren’t even true?’ which we see in Rushdie’s Haroun. Here, we see how the repetitional device of the primary oral world, which was used as a mnemonic tool since there was no other way of recording sound (no writing technology), can also be employed by the fiction writer. See Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 92. David Pinault, Story-telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992), 18. 57 Maack, Imagining the Real, 127. 58 Ibid. 59 Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 129. 60 Ibid., 131. 61 Ibid., 111. 62 Maack, Imagining the Real, 129. 63 Sharon Monteith, Jenny Newman and Pat Wheeler, Contemporary British and Irish Fiction: An Introduction through Interviews (London: Arnold, 2004), 43.

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8

Storyteller as Novelist: J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello

In the midst of life’s fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of living. Even the first great book of the genre, Don Quixote, teaches how the spiritual greatness, the boldness, the helpfulness of one of the noblest of men, Don Quixote, are completely devoid of counsel and do not contain the slightest scintilla of wisdom. If now and then, in the course of the centuries, efforts have been made [. . .] to implant instruction in the novel, these attempts have always amounted to a modification of the novel form. Benjamin, Illuminations, 87–8 One of the recurring preoccupations foregrounded by the return of the storyteller in this book is the relationship of the novelistic author to the oral storyteller. This relationship has seemed to play to the advantage of the storyteller whose return to the novel serves as a means of foregrounding the status of his craft by highlighting the fictionality of fiction, while paradoxically, not denying a story’s ability to contain ‘truth(s)’. The previous chapters have more-so engaged with the contradistinction of novelist and storyteller in relation to a conception, which largely follows Benjamin, that sees the figures as belonging to distinct oral and written traditions. This has led to readings of the storyteller within texts as being primarily informed by a relationship to oral traditions, orality, voice and presence, and to a conception of the storyteller as one who plays a particular function within society and as an oral storytelling figure. The relationship to the concept of an author, one existing in a space of ‘pure’ textuality, has hitherto been absent. In Coetzee’s fiction, we are presented with a very definite textual world, a world of texts, readings and misreadings, and narratives that come from liminal

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margins, from lost, forgotten or censored texts, positions and places. Numerous critics have highlighted Coetzee’s problematization of authorship, authorial figures and tropes in his fiction. Indeed, any Coetzee critic or even reader, would find it difficult to miss this preoccupation: authorship permeates most (if not all) of Coetzee’s novels making it a central concern of his fictional oeuvre, and one which, therefore, demands attention. As Michael Kochin summarizes: Coetzee’s work going all the way back to his first book, Dusklands, is rich in characters who are author-figures. [. . .] there is the report-writing magistrate of Waiting for the Barbarians; the letter-writing classicist of Age of Iron; Foe and Susan Barton in Foe; Dostoyevsky, the eponymous protagonist of The Master of Petersburg; and the scholarly author Lurie (in) Disgrace [. . .] In Coetzee’s 2003 Nobel lecture, ‘He and his Man’, we even heard the authorial voice of Robinson Crusoe, supposed author of his own story and of Tour through the Whole Island of Britain, both of which, in Coetzee’s fiction, Crusoe published under the pseudonym of Daniel Defoe. Finally, the author as a character is Coetzee himself in his volumes of memoirs, Boyhood and Youth.1

Kochin’s list is long but not definitive. To it we can add: the fictional Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who is also the protagonist of his 2003 novel of the same name, as well as the very same novelist who makes an appearance in his subsequent novel Slow Man (2005); the diary-writer from Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and finally the biographer of the fictional and ‘deceased’ novelist, (but actual author of the novel) J. M. Coetzee, in Summertime (2009). Presenting Coetzee as storyteller, therefore, or, indeed, searching for (a) storyteller(s) in his novels, may seem like a strange, if not unlikely endeavour considering, as I have just recounted, the vast array of authorial figures in his texts who very much assert their status as writers, as opposed to (oral) storytellers. Moreover, the fact that Coetzee’s textual worlds often carry some relationship to other texts, (such as Foe (1986) and Master of Petersburg (1994)) or highlight in a variety of ways the act of writing, makes the search for an ‘oral’ storyteller seem futile. However, as I have highlighted in the readings in this book, it is not only the storyteller’s status as an ‘oral’ figure that defines him, but also, and more importantly, the function that he has in a particular culture, community of wider society. It is this aspect of the storyteller which Coetzee’s fiction presents: the storyteller as a figure who tells fictions that present us with stories that reflect our own concerns. This final chapter closely examines Coetzee’s relationship to the authorial novelist as a means of uncovering the novelist’s relationship to the storyteller, concentrating on a reading of Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003).2 What

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I argue is that Coetzee’s presentation of the novelist and his understanding of the practice of novel writing generates a return to the storyteller as a means of solving the problem of the novel. For Coetzee, this lies, in part, in the condition of postmodernity, but it also lies in our constructions of and understanding of reality and the role and value of fiction within this construction. In other words, how do we value our novels (and novelists) and what do we value them for? Coetzee’s fiction seeks to answer these questions, urging us to look at the way in which we construct reality within fiction. Coetzee’s fiction urges us to look beyond the surface, or (if we believe there is no depth) to recognize which part is simulation, simulacra or fiction.. Coetzee’s position as storyteller can thus be understood as one which fits the function of cultural questioner as much as producer and preserver. It is the text as a whole, not the narrative content within it, that places Coetzee, as a writerly novelist, or more correctly, a ‘fictioneer’3 (to borrow his phrase), paradoxically, into the role of the storyteller.

The novel, The Canon and the storyteller In his pre-Nobel speech and the subsequent speech that followed it – a fictional story titled ‘He and His Man’, – given on 10 December 2003 in the Concert Hall of Sweden’s capital Stockholm – Coetzee demonstrated one of the key preoccupations as a writer of fiction, namely, his beliefs surrounding the question of authorship (which, of course, relates to his own position as an author of fictions). Both the speech he gave and the subsequent ‘story’ he narrated, featured the fictional character Robinson Crusoe and the figure of the author writing him. This was a story about a relationship, one which Coetzee describes as a yearning for each to meet ‘in the flesh’ (and perhaps talk about ‘writing’),4 but one which was not to be realized: Robinson and his author, instead, being likened to two ships passing each other by on stormy seas ‘too busy even to wave’.5 Considering that one of his novels – Foe – engages with the story of Robinson Crusoe and the story of the novel, the fact that Coetzee returns to these figures may not be entirely surprising, but placed in the context of a Nobel Prize-giving Speech, at the ceremony of one of the most prestigious prizes any literary author can ever be awarded, was, perhaps, a little unusual. Coetzee (broadly) defied the expectations of what a Nobel Speech should consist of,6 not in the strict sense, of course, but simply because he avoided speaking in any direct way about himself and, instead, told a story. However, perhaps Coetzee’s ‘storytelling’ performance was not so surprising to the audience given that this was Coetzee, and the fact

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that it was not the first time he had performed this form of ‘disappearing trick’ in front of a live audience.7 Coetzee’s fictional performances do, of course, have a very specific message (as did this one) and the platform upon which he gave it, would undoubtedly engender response. What better way then to assert his beliefs about his role as ‘fictioneer’8 than to make a statement here, at the Nobel Prize Ceremony? In the few words Coetzee said by way of introduction, before he gave the Nobel Speech ‘He and His Man’ (2003), Coetzee recounts the story of his first encounter with the figure of Robinson Crusoe in his formative years, in childhood; (he gives the ages of around eight or nine). He explains that Robinson Crusoe made an impression on him such that, he says, ‘Crusoe became a figure in my imagination’.9 However, he then goes on to relate, how a few months later when reading a children’s encyclopaedia, the ‘puzzlement’ that overcame him when he learnt that, besides Crusoe, there was another man present ‘a man with a wig named Daniel Defoe’10 (a figure he went to represent in his own novel Foe). This figure did not feature in the novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) but was something to do with it, though the encyclopaedia failed to clarify just ‘how this man fitted into the story’.11 Coetzee, like many a reader before him, had believed the book to be by Robinson Crusoe as is indicated in the original title which is: The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last strangely delivered by pyrates. Written by Himself.12

The novel, Robinson Crusoe, actually presents itself as a ‘true’ account, being ‘written by the hero, with Defoe’s authorship hidden. The fact that the work credited the fictional protagonist and not the actual author Daniel Defoe, led many readers at the time to believe that Crusoe was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents. Defoe, who is designated as the book’s ‘editor’, compounded this by vouching for the story’s authenticity in the preface to the book, in which he says he ‘believes the thing to be a just History of fact (with) ‘neither (the) Appearance of Fiction in it’ (RC 2). Coetzee’s first encounter with the story of the Crusoe, then, was to read it as the title suggested: ‘A History of [. . .] Written by Himself ’. Coetzee had been deceived by fiction and, implicitly, by the author himself. Crusoe was not a ‘real’ man but a fictional being. The question was: How did the knowledge of this affect the ‘figure’ he’d become in Coetzee’s imagination? Was he any less real? And what of the author – where did he feature in all this? Did he even matter?

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Coetzee’s story ‘He and His Man’, therefore, called for an audience response to the question of authorship, which included a questioning of the role and expectations the audience had of this figure (an example of whom was standing before them in the flesh in the person of John Coetzee) in contemporary culture. Beyond the surface questions that pertain to the Nobel Speech and the expectations the audience may have had of the author that gave it – (e.g. what do we expect to hear at a Nobel Prize ceremony as the Nobel Speech? Do we expect some sort of biography of the life as a writer, his key preoccupations and thoughts about his writing, some confession which ‘explains’ something about his work – in short, an emotional as well as intellectual reaction from the author?), Coetzee’s storytelling speech urged the audience to think beyond the question of the author, asking them to ponder instead on the wider questions such as: can we be satisfied simply with story? Can we be satisfied with a story that doesn’t have an author? What does it matter how a story is presented, how it is told? Moreover, to what extent does it matter if we are lied to? How does it change the truth of the story to know it is not truth? In the celebrity culture in which we live, these questions are even more poignant and have a strange relevance to the ancient role of the storyteller. They not only return us to the role this figure had within cultures and communities, but also, and importantly, in so doing, remind us of the importance that cultures and communities placed on story. The traditional storyteller was always and solely responsible for telling a story, one which was directly mediated by the audience that listened to him. Nowadays, fame,, and the commodity of the book, its value in the market is very much a reality for the majority of writers of fiction (and, arguably, also was in Defoe’s day). Before any given story can even be ‘heard’ by its intended audience, a panel of judges, in the guise of literary agents working for large publishing houses, passes judgement on its worth. The value that might otherwise come from a direct relationship with audience, therefore, is lost, having already been mediated. It is in this way, as Benjamin also argued, that the storyteller has been seemingly displaced. However, as I argue in this chapter, by showing us that the concept of author is problematic and not to be trusted, Coetzee returns us to what the author really is, and always has been: he returns us to the storyteller. Coetzee’s Noble Speech, therefore, in engaging with the question of author, serves to assert his position as storyteller, whose way of speaking is simply, and definitively, through story. If Coetzee’s first relationship to the author of the text was to treat them as an imposter, then the fictionalized author of his novel Foe is presented as precisely this. The name ‘Foe’ not only echoes to the name of the actual, historical writer, Daniel Defoe, but also indicates a level of distrust – foe as in enemy – in the

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authorial position and, as many critics have pointed out, also a falsity: the French faux, or a fiction. Coetzee engages with these issues in his novel Foe while crucially ‘returning’ us to the history of literary criticism and the novel. Indeed, it is the novel as a genre, and the realism that is often synonymous to the novel form, that serves as Coetzee’s entry point into debates surrounding its authors. Already then, from the title alone, before we have even entered he fictional world of the novel, fundamental questions are raised: from ‘who is the author?’ to ‘what is an author?’ to ‘what does it matter who’s speaking?’,13 a question that Foucault posed about Beckett’s writing in 1970. As Foe is a form of re-telling of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and follows in the narrative tradition of the Robinsonade, it forms a dialectical relationship not only with its precursor, or Ur-text, but with the entire Western novelistic tradition. However, positioned as the narrative that contests the ‘true’ account offered by Crusoe and exposing the author to be a fraud, Foe can thus be read as the Ur-text of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe which coerces us into engaging with and reflecting upon: the Western narrative tradition as a whole, the Canon, and with critical texts such as Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel which presents Defoe as one of the founding fathers of the genre, highlighting ‘realism’ as one of the novel’s tenets.14 As Derek Attridge comments: every writer who desires to be read (and that is perhaps part of what it means to write) has to seek admittance to the canon – or, more precisely, a canon, since any group approval of a text is an instance of canonization. [. . .] Awareness of this necessity, conscious or not, governs the act of writing quite as much as the need for self-expression or the wish to communicate. [. . .] Acceptance into the canon is not merely a matter of success in the marketplace; it also confers value, although the value it confers is necessarily understood as not conferred and contingent but inherent and permanent. What is unusual about Foe is the way it simultaneously seeks admittance to the literary canon on these terms and draws attention to the canon’s cultural and historical contingency, just as Barton, in seeking cultural acceptance for her story and through it an assertion of her unique subjectivity, shows an increasing awareness of the double bind that this implies.15

Attridge’s notion of value here, relates to the value a text has as ‘literature’ in the sense of art. Beyond the market value, canonization is (in certain people’s views) a mechanism that confers this value of the text as a cultural and historical commodity. Moreover, it is this, in turn, which elevates the author into the role of ‘master’, a position that, as we will see, Coetzee warns us against by asserting his status as storyteller.

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In this light, we could argue that Foe does not necessarily seek acceptance into a canon or The Canon (if this exists) precisely because it highlights the permanence and mythologizing that comes with canonization, with texts such as Robinson Crusoe.16 Although we can read these canonized texts with a consciousness and awareness of their cultural and historical positioning, on another level – as Coetzee’s own boyhood experience of the text and its ‘author’ confirms – they are still current and by the very fact of their canonization, they still belong to the stories or myths that we, as a ‘larger’ community, can be exposed to. The messages they impart are static unless they are retranslated into ‘new’ stories to fit current concerns. This is what the storyteller has always been engaged with, and what the tradition of storytelling was informed by from ancient times. Robinson Crusoe, had it been an oral tale, would have no doubt shifted in terms of its message to make it culturally relevant. The storytellers would always have negotiated its meaning in relation to the audience. From this perspective, Cotezee’s revisiting of this novel asserts the importance of re-telling as an evaluatory as well as rejuvenating practice. It is this concept of re-telling as rejuvenation that protects us from what Frank Kermode first identified in his book The Sense of an Ending (1967) perpetuating ‘degenerate’ myths,17 which can be seen as a tendency of the condition of postmodernity. Kermode referred to ‘fictions’ that do not acknowledge their own status as ‘fictions’ as ‘degenerate myths’, dangerous discourses, passed off as truth, used to enclose, seduce and gain power.18 In a sense, the return of the storyteller is itself a means of drawing attention to the provisional status of ‘stories’ and, therefore, to safeguard against their potential abuse as what Kermode calls ‘degenerate myths’. By returning to the storyteller as opposed to the author and thus emphasizing the status of ‘story’ as opposed to ‘truth’, we are returning to a more ‘honest’ representation of ‘reality’, whether this be within the ‘real’, or ‘literary’, realm. As I have noted earlier, it is precisely the staticness and permanence of ‘the book’,19 which, for Benjamin, constituted the fundamental difference between the novel and the (oral) story, that led to the erroneous belief that the oral and written traditions, and their respective figureheads, were entirely separate. However, novels such as Foe challenge this polarized view of the two traditions, written and oral. Precisely by highlighting the fixity and permanence of the written text, and the reverence that can be bestowed on the text and its author as a result of this permanence, Coetzee’s novels seek to highlight the resulting dangers from a tradition that becomes, in many ways, equally fixed: the dangers inherent in ‘The Canon’. It is precisely this fixity which due to its permanence can continue to perpetuate degenerate myths rather than allow us the creative

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possibility to retranslate them anew. Moreover, the value that we ascribe to our fictions and stories that are in danger of being degenerate myths is also questionable. In other words, canonization is contestable: who is included ‘in the club’ is motivated by an elitist cultural body, the academy, which although, on the one hand, is knowledgeable, is equally in danger of falling into the same trap, of mythologizing the mythologies. Benjamin’s essay on the storyteller, in a sense, proves this. What Coetzee’s fiction does by highlighting the artifice of the author, the text, and broadly the tradition of novelistic realism as well as the academic discourses that surround the reading of novels, is to shake these from the inside. He assumes the position of storyteller through his ability to re-tell and retranslate our stories for us – to (re)present them anew or from a different perspective. This ultimately serves to highlight the importance of and, indeed, necessity for us to engage with these texts. We need to re-translate and re-tell them as the oral storytellers have always done. This is vital for our written (and oral) fictions if they are to continue to speak to us and reflect our current concerns. This may, however, mean a revision of our expectations of the novel, or at the very least, a testing out to see whether the novel can cope with a move that takes it beyond its own textual constraints.

Elizabeth Costello: The novelist and the storyteller Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons is a novel concerned with the place and function of the novelist in contemporary society. The protagonist is the fictional Australian novelist, Elizabeth Costello, whose mini-biography we are presented with at the opening of the novel, and which, significantly, serves to establish her authority as an important, contemporary novelist. We are told: Elizabeth Costello is a writer, born 1928, which makes her sixty-six years old, going on sixty-seven. She has written nine novels, two books of poems, a book on bird life, and a body of journalism. By birth she is Australian. She was born in Melbourne and still lives there, though she spent the years 1951–1963 aboard, in England and France. She has been married twice. She has two children, one by each marriage. (EC 1)

Costello is first described in the mode of a literary biography for a definite reason: we are presented with a set of facts and dates about her achievements and her life that conform to the tenets of novelistic realism. We learn about her literary achievements and their reception, for example, that she is best

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known for an early novel titled The House on Eccles Street (1969), which is a re-telling of Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) from the perspective of Leopold’s wife, Molly Bloom. Her novels sound interesting, believable and are placed alongside ‘real’ novelists, Joyce and other literary masters. We are told that Costello has won a prestigious prize, ‘$50,000 [. . .] one of the larger literary prizes in the United States’ (EC 2) and that her first lecture – one of eight that make up her ‘lessons’ and which she gives at various institutions around the world – is to be given as part of the prize ceremony at an eminent American university. Already emerging from this brief picture of Costello as novelist, we see the notion of value highlighted. Costello’s literary record is impressive. She has won prizes. She is renowned and is invited to speak to audiences around the world. Does the fact that she has been awarded prizes mean that she is especially ‘valued’ as an important novelist, a cultural producer who is worthy of being read? If value does not only come from monetary means – the sale of her books – where does it come from? Who decides her importance? And if it comes from the academy, of indeed, the publishing houses, are these institutions representative of all, and should they even be? These questions have and continue to engender debate, of course, within the very academy which breeds them. However, in Elizabeth Costello they are raised within the novel itself. More pertinently perhaps, one cannot fail to question the role and place of the author-novelist in this: Coetzee, a prize-winning author himself, whose professional life follows similar paths to Costello. The question how we value the novelist, including Coetzee himself, is thus brought into play. The novel’s subtitle is ‘Eight Lessons’, where each lesson forms the basis of a chapter and (many of) whose subsequent titles (broadly) raise questions pertinent to academic criticism and that relate to literary, philosophical and/or ethical concerns. For example, lesson one (and chapter one) is called ‘Realism’, lesson two (and chapter two) ‘The novel in Africa’, and so on. Moreover, each lesson, as well as being the title of a chapter of the novel, is also the title of one of a series of lectures that Costello gives at various eminent universities around the world. The lectures are staged: as well as presenting the performance of the lectures and the audience’s responses to them, the novel tells the story of Costello’s travels to and from these lectures. Costello is accompanied by her son, whose comments on the person of his mother, the ‘famous writer’ (EC 21), starkly juxtapose her human-ness – the frail, ‘old woman’ (EC 27) – with her fictional and public selves. In this sense, the public and the private, the individual and the collective, come to be explored through the person of the novelist: an elevated

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cultural producer, a knowledgeable and important figure according to the norms of Western cultural value. Following the codes of novelistic realism then, the narrative is narrated by an omniscient third-person narrator. After the brief literary biography, we then move to the narrative situation, where Costello is accompanied by her son on her first lecture in Pennsylvania. As her son lives in Massachusetts, it has given them a good opportunity to spend some time together. The third-person narrator relates the events mostly through the eyes of John, Costello’s son.20 The focus is thus on Costello and seems to be driven by an intention to describe the events which lead to Costello’s lectures as a means of identifying and supplying more information about the writer, so that a picture can emerge of who she is. Indeed, the question of who Costello really is, the reality of the fictional Costello, is foregrounded through a questioning of the mode of realism itself. The first of her eight lessons, ‘Realism’, is the first chapter of the novel in which Costello’s opening biography is contained. However, already from the second page of the novel, the omniscience of the narrative is subtly disrupted by the insertion of various asides pertaining to the way the narrative is constructed. For example, we are told to expect the ‘present tense henceforth’; and as we move forward through the narrative we are told ‘we skip’ (EC 2) certain sections; and we are ‘told’ rather than ‘shown’ that ‘in her room a dialogue takes place’ (EC 2). These little asides do not constitute a dramatic rupture within the realist illusion, but do serve to nudge the reader every so often towards the fact that this is being narrated, that there is an omniscient someone behind the working of the text. More importantly, it urges us to consider the question ‘What is Realism?’ (EC 18). Indeed, the narrator provides us with some thoughts on this: before Costello begin to her lecture on ‘realism’, the (now not-so-omniscient) narrator supersedes the project by telling us how realism ‘works’ by returning us to Robinson Crusoe, and continuing the questions raised with the ‘birth’ of realism in the novel: The blue costume, the greasy hair, these are details, signs of a moderate realism. Supply the particulars, allow the significations to emerge of themselves. A procedure pioneered by Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe, cast up on a beach, looks around for his shipmates. But there are none. ‘I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them’, says he, ‘except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.’ (EC 4)

On the one hand, Coetzee rejects realism, and opts, as Susan Gallagher notes, ‘for a non-realistic, self-referential fiction that highlights its own unreliability’.21 By creating a person out of objects and signs, the text shows that realism can

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only really touch the surface. The narrator explains that the materiality or facts of the realist project are simply signs; he instructs on the nature of ‘showing’ not (story)telling. It is this self-consciousness on the part of the narrator, who reveals the fact that he is writing in a realist mode that places the novel under the umbrella term of ‘postmodernist’ fiction, and that moves the narrative towards a telling, even if this be characterized by a telling that is highlighting the narrative voice as predominantly showing. However, overall the narrator does not intrude too much. As he tells us: It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction. Breaking the dream draws attention to the constructedness of the story, and plays havoc with the realist illusion. However, unless certain scenes are skipped over we will be here all afternoon. The skips are not part of the text, they are part of the performance. (EC 16)

The asides, which ‘disrupt’ the narrative voice in Elizabeth Costello, only do so subtely which leads us to agree with Dominic Head’s assertion on Coetzee’s employment of realism in relation to self-consciousness: It is however, possible to overstate the effect of Coetzee’s self-consciousness, which does not present unreliability to disrupt the surface reading experience in the way that some postmodernist works do. In fact, there is a strong contrary pull operating simultaneously, an attempt to resuscitate aspects of realism (even when they are undermined).22

Indeed, as Head suggests, it is with a nudge, rather than a push that Coetzee reveals the danger of our ‘falling’ for fictions, particularly those who employ ‘realism’. As much as the narrator of Elizabeth Costello warns us of this, he also employs the very mode that then allows us to fall back into the ‘lull’ of the very illusion he has highlighted. It is not then, so much ‘an attempt to resuscitate aspects of realism’ as Head suggests, but an attempt to find whether realism can penetrate deeper than the surface, and whether the selfconsciousness about realism can move us beyond the novelistic realism and towards something deeper – the ‘moral of the story’ the deeper meaning, that Coetzee’s novel Foe was also trying to discover. Indeed, it is this aspect of Coetzee’s fiction, ‘its capacity to retain an aspect of “realist illusion”’23 in order to transform into something other, which is where Coetzee’s true aims lie: Coetzee is concerned with how we’ve arrived at novelistic realism in the first

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place and his questioning of it stems from a need to test (with us) whether this mode is the most suitable for the larger project of telling our stories ‘truthfully’, if not ‘realistically’. The reference to Defoe, as the instigator of this mode of narration, therefore, is significant on two levels. First, it warns us of being ‘duped’ by the realism into believing the ‘wrong’ fictions as ‘truth’: the notion of degenerate myths. Secondly, it serves to reassert the question of value that was brought up in the opening biography: as Kochin reminds us, Defoe was ‘the first writer to make a living by the sale of his books (. . . which) meant that his stories were good, in the economic sense, which gave them a prima facie claim to be good or valuable in themselves’24 (my emphasis). This question of value, with which the novel is concerned, not only returns to, but urges us to look at Costello as representative of the figure of the (contemporary) novelist. This is a concern of Benjamin’s in his essay on ‘The Storyteller’, when he professes that the novelist had taken over from the storyteller, and that the question of value is intricately linked to the notion of counsel or wisdom, an attribute that the novelist lacks, precisely because he writes rather than (orally) tells stories. For Benjamin, the novel is less concerned with an overall meaning, explained as the discovery of ‘the moral of the story’,25 but more so concerned with representing ‘the meaning of life’26 through an examination of a life, the latter of which Elizabeth Costello seems, at first glance, to be seeking to present. For the novelist to become storyteller, therefore, (s)he would need to write novels that include a moral, or, more simply, to write novels that contain (like stories) some inherent ‘wisdom’ or ‘counsel’.27 This would make them morally valuable, an attribute that the commodification of novels has ultimately weakened, if not simply eradicated. However, Defoe also returns us to the beginnings of the novel, and as Elizabeth Costello is a questioning of the very role and nature of novel today, this is also significant. As Ian Watt suggests, the novel, which emerged as a distinct form in the eighteenth century, is founded on the concepts of realism, of individuality and originality, and on the ensuing separation and rejection ‘from its classical and mediaeval heritage [. . .] of universals’.28 Moreover, Watt explains, ‘the novel is the form of literature which most fully reflects this individualist and innovating reorientation’ which distinguishes it from ‘previous literary forms (which) reflected the general tendency of their cultures to make conformity to traditional practice the major test of truth.’29 If the novel (as Watt asserts) is founded on originality, realism and the individual orientation, orientations that arose from modernity, then what is the novel in the condition of postmodernity? In short, how has the novel changed, if at all? Coetzee gives us realism (though mediated),

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originality (this is a series of fictionalized lectures, a kind of academic criticism within the novel), and individuality (in the sense that Costello is presented as an ‘individual’ novelist). However, Costello’s ‘eight lessons’ equally point to a didactic feature in the novel, which we could construe as a return to Benjamin’s idea of ‘counsel’.30 Indeed, if we consider Costello’s lessons as a form of counsel, we might question: Is this notion of counsel individually derived, the counsel of an isolated individual? Or, does it reflect a counsel that comes from communal truths? In fact, precisely what this notion of ‘counsel’ is and where it comes from are, therefore, not only intricate concerns of this novel, but are also concerns which lend insight into the nature and purpose of the novel itself. From another point of view, Costello’s ‘lessons’ could be construed as a form of cultural criticism, or more specifically, an investigation into the construct of cultural criticism and the role of literature within culture. As Patrick Hayes suggests, ‘Coetzee first began to make the discourse of the Kulturkritik an explicit theme through the character of Elizabeth Costello’.31 But the cultural criticism in Elizabeth Costello is paradoxically one which highlights the place which the novel and the novelist has with a culture that looks to them for this form of ‘counsel’. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, therefore, in many ways returns full circle to the problem that Benjamin set out in ‘The Storyteller’, namely, to the relationship between the novelist and the storyteller and the nature of their respective fictions; are they really so different? As such, the concept of wisdom that Coetzee’s novel explores is the extent to which wisdom can be present and presentable as ‘valuable’ by a novelist. Is the novelist wholly other to the storyteller, or can the contemporary novelist still impart (non-individualist) wisdom? In Elizabeth Costello the lessons issue from the voice of a specific novelist, who speaks to an audience of listeners, who, implicitly are also her readers. Curiously, the fictional character of Elizabeth Costello reminds us of Byatt’s fictional narratologist Gillian Perholt. Echoing Byatt’s ‘The Djinn’, the thematic content of Costello’s lectures relates to the overall message that the novel seeks to impart, though in Elizabeth Costello the lectures are less concerned with retelling ‘stories’ than with the construction of stories and the essence of the deeper message that stories impart: philosophy, ethics, ecology, good and evil, the nature of fiction, the place of the humanities in culture. Although Costello is depicted as frail, ageing, overweight and ‘difficult’, as a real, present and embodied speaker who stands in front of an erudite and distinguished audience, in her role as novelist (the contemporary of the storyteller), Costello commands attention. In one sense, much like Perholt, Costello is presented as an embodied speaker, whose lectures

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or ‘lessons’ are given to live audiences around the world: she is placed in a role where, in ‘speaking’ her message, in moving from a written to an oral mode, she must somehow give account for herself as a novelist. But the authenticity of the speaker – our storyteller-novelist – is not only ruptured by the omniscient narrator’s constant reminders of the fictionality of the realist text, but by the ‘picture’ which emerges of Costello, the novelist, herself. Perholt and Costello share some similarities but the differences between these two figures are striking. Aside from the fact that Perholt is not a novelist but an academic, as I argued in Chapter 7, ‘The Djinn’s polemic rests on attesting to the status of the female storyteller-novelist as one who is able to stand confidently as an equal and recognized cultural producer alongside the position of men. Indeed, it is ultimately the narrative voice (or the thinly veiled voice of the extra-textual novelist, Byatt) whose message is the real project of the ‘The Djinn’: the narrative highlights the author’s ability and power as an academic and intellectual as well as a novelist-storyteller, asserting not only her status as a female novelist and intellectual, but also the importance of her novels as cultural product for her contemporary audience. With Costello however, this project is not presented to us through a reading of her novel on Molly Bloom nor does it come through the voice of the omniscient narrator, who is significantly non-gendered and elusive. From the outset, Elizabeth Costello does not question her own role as a writer (or teller) of fictions: she is already in the position of the established female novelist, and neither, by implication does her extra-textual author seek this authority. In other words, the fact that she is recognized as a cultural producer and intellectual is a given and the text does not seek to establish this in order to highlight this role. Instead, the question of Coetzee’s text is not whether women (or men) can be, or have the right to be, celebrated novelists, but rather it moves beyond the question of gender to the larger question of the role and purpose of the novelist: What message does she (as a novelist) have to impart? What is the real content of her lessons? Or in other words, what precisely is her (or, the novelist’s) ‘wisdom’? Whereas Byatt’s assertion was a call for the importance of the female intellectual and novelist to be able to stand next to men as a cultural producer, Costello is not so confident in her role. Coetzee paradoxically gives Costello a ‘wisdom’ not through the telling of fairy tales, but by giving her ‘lessons’ that relate directly to her own role within the novel itself. However, at the same time, in a swift ironic turn, Coetzee discredits the concept of wisdom through irony, through the presentation of Costello’s bumbling, frail ‘old’ body, a physical

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presence that does not exude authority. The old grandmother sitting with her distaff and telling tales to an audience of listeners who are eager to hear the wisdom of her tales, instead, emerges in the condition of modernity as an ageing novelist whose audience is made up of academics who ‘translate’ her messages to others, and who are further mediated within contemporary culture as a particular kind of cultural product, which does not appeal to the masses, but only to the select few. Further juxtaposed against this image of the renowned novelist, is Costello’s sister Blanche who, we are told, although initially ‘trained as a classical scholar, has retrained as a medical missionary [. . .] in rural Zululand’ (EC 116). Ironically, although Costello perceives Blanche to have given up ‘an academic career for a life of obscure toil’ (EC 116) – she concentrated on helping children infected by Aids – it is Blanche that becomes ‘suddenly famous, famous enough, now, to have an honorary degree conferred on her by a university in her adopted country’ (EC 116) due to a book she published on the valuable aid work she achieved in the hospital in which she worked. Costello’s sister’s book is the true story of ‘toil’ in which the real project of helping humanity in a tangible and physical sense is performed and which leads Blanche to say to Elizabeth, ‘I do not need to consult novels’ (EC 131). Through the character of Blanche, therefore, we are asked to look closer at our novelists and to explore the nature of their wisdom(s). If Elizabeth Costello the novelist (unlike the storyteller) is isolated from the very real communities, that, conversely, her sister, Blanche, the non-novelist, is actively involved in, then she clearly also lacks the ability to impart any ‘real’ wisdom. Costello, unlike Blanche, lacks the necessary ‘experience’32 to impart wisdom, a wisdom that Benjamin presented as deriving from the community in which the storyteller lived. From this perspective it seems that Benjamin was right. The novelist has isolated herself. Moreover, if the novelist has superseded the storyteller and the novel is now the medium which contains our stories, what is the implication of this in terms of the novelist’s ability to counsel? If Benjamin sees the novelist as too isolated to ‘counsel’,33 as (s)he is ‘uncounseled’,34 then it is here where Coetzee’s self-consciousness resonates. If Costello is giving us ‘lessons’, where does her ability to counsel come from? Indeed, is this counsel ‘valuable’ to us? Can we construe it as ‘wisdom’? In an erudite essay on Coetzee’s novel Foe, Patrick Hayes presents us with Coetzee’s solution to the novelist’s search for wisdom.35 Hayes draws a comparison between Foe and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), drawing attention to a narrative genre of the wisdom-tale which, he argues, forms the epilogue

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of Crime and Punishment and informs the final chapter of Coetzee’s Foe. In Coetzee’s much-discussed novel, Hayes observes that the final and most ‘elusive’ chapter of the novel (chapter IV) ‘sometimes seems the only thing relevant to the discussion’,36 and it is the wisdom tale which, for Hayes, holds the key to its interpretation. Hayes cites various other key critical interpretations to this final section of Foe (Attridge, Spivak, Attwell),37 establishing that although they do not directly (as he does), conceive of the ending as a wisdom-tale, that all these readings converge in a broadly unified consensus which sees ‘the novel and its processes [. . .] discarded, and a realm of utterly certain being [. . .] held up as the basis of literary value.’38 Drawing on Michael Holquist’s reading of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Hayes explains that the wisdom-tale ‘a fundamentally different genre’39 to the novel, has roots in ‘the pre-enlightenment past’ of the ‘oral storytelling tradition’, and reveals happenings which come to pass ‘in some realm of experience beyond the model of subjectivity hitherto assumed by the novel’. In this sphere, there is no ‘self-doubt, no time-bound search for cause and effect, no rationalist voice questioning its own motives but instead a suddenly granted mystical unity of the body and its meaning.’40 Moreover, unlike the novel, the wisdom-tale does not follow the temporal axis nor does it have the same narrative structures. Instead, Hayes observes, it ‘hint(s) at the disparity between the secular type of knowledge available to human reason through causal explanation’ and rather ‘suggests there is a special type of perception that lies beyond this sphere – one that is of necessity mysterious, pointed – towards rather than grasped by the reasoning individual.’41 In Foe, Friday does not learn language – the language of the ‘master’ not only because he does not want to, but because he has no tongue: it has been cut out. His story, which is the story that remains ‘unknown’ in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and which, in part, informs the narrative quest of the novel’s narrator, Susan Barton, is hence, unreachable. The only sign we have of Friday approaching language is in a final scene where Barton finds him sitting at the the writer’s desk of Mr Foe (an echo of the real Daniel Defoe of Robinson Crusoe) where he ‘wears the wig, picks up the quill and pretends to write – or at least writes what Foe calls ‘a beginning’ – the letter ‘o’ (F 152).42 But ‘o’ is not a beginning – but an ending (in the Greek script at least, an allusion perhaps to God’s pronouncement in the revelations: ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the beginning and the end’ (Rev. 22.13). Foe instructs Susan, ‘tomorrow you must teach him a’ (F 152). But Friday’s beginning has already pointed to the fact that his story lies beyond the language of signs, beyond endings and beginnings and returns Friday to his roots in Robinson Crusoe, to a religious and philosophic

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understanding of the world which lies beyond signs, representations and simulations: the ‘real’ real.43 [I] ask’d him who made the Sea, the Ground we walk’d on, and the Hills, and Woods; he told me it was one old Benamuckee, that lived beyond all: He could describe nothing of this great Person, but that he was very old; much older he said than the Sea, or the Land; than the Moon, or the Stars: I ask’d him then, if this old Person had made all Things, why did not all Things worship him; he look’d very grave, and with a perfect Look of Innocence, said All things do say O to him. (RC 216)

Although the other three sections of Coetzee’s Foe broadly follow the tenets of novelistic realism, the ending clearly moves outside realism and the constraints of temporality – where ‘the water is still and dead, the same water as yesterday as last year as three hundred years ago’ (F 157) where the signs are ‘talismans’ (F 156) that shine in between ‘black’ and ‘white’ light (F 156). For Hayes, therefore, the ending expresses ‘the certainties of a restorative justice, in which the occluded Friday is at the centre of the text, bodied forth in a specifically non-novelistic literary form’.44 If Hayes’ argument is correct, and we conceive of the previous three sections of Foe (Susan’s narratives) as a representation of the ‘values’ of the novel genre – which Hayes presents as being founded on the political and cultural legacy of Enlightenment – and we recognize the final section as somehow moving beyond this, outside of this, then the storyteller in Coetzee, demythologized, very much absent, emerges from the boundaries of the novel itself. To find Friday’s voice, the voice of silence, is to find the storyteller. In Elizabeth Costello, this preoccupation with and the wisdom-tale ‘wisdom’ remerges. However, rather than though we are not reading a re-writing of Defoe’s novel, (an example of the first kind of novel which conformed to realism, originality and individuality) instead we are reading the story of the novelist who is speaking to us directly about the novel. For contemporary readers, and equally for Costello’s audience of listeners, the quest to find Costello’s ‘wisdom’ begins with an examination of who she is. Her son asks: ‘What is the truth of his mother?’ (EC 30). As the biographical description of Costello reveals, what we are presented with initially are facts: nationality, important works, some details of a life which show who this writer is so that we can further ‘mediate’ their message. We look for and through a kind of ‘realism’; we look for the individual. Her son’s question, and the question that the audience and the reader asks of the novelist, is repeated, ‘What sort of creature is she, really?’ (EC 5), and it is one

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which comes, in part, from our need to penetrate deeper into her biography. Costello’s son explains: ‘But my mother has been a man,’ he persists. ‘She has also been a dog. She can think her way into other people, into other existences. I have read her; I know. It is within her powers. Isn’t that what is most important about fiction: that it takes us out of ourselves into other lives? (EC 23)

What kind of creature is she? He suggests: ‘A sibyl’ or ‘an oracle’ (EC 31). The connotations here, are both ironic and serious, but return us, curiously, to the concept of wisdom. As Marina Warner explains: ‘In their very identity as truthtellers, the Sibyls of tradition cancel connections to history [. . .]. They speak their verses, or sing their messages, and though they are always communicating a prior universal wisdom, they are seen as actively shaping it – their voices are instruments of knowledge they pass on in order to prepare for the life ahead.’45 Coetzee seems to be suggesting that it is pointless to search for the ‘individual’ when looking at the novelist, because the novelist’s wisdom is not entirely conscious. Indeed, it may, like the oracular muse, come from some other place, and thus provide wisdoms which are not so much individual but universal. In a very short essay titled ‘Fictional Beings’ (2003), where Coetzee is speaking as Coetzee the novelist, he seems to confirm this notion. In this short commentary, he does not talk about novelists, but about ‘storytellers’ and ‘storytelling’, which he describes as as constituting ‘a universal and important element of culture’.46 Coetzee explains what it means to ‘enter another mind’, which, whether fictional or not, is still effectively something other than his own, and thus, arguably, a separate (though fictional) entity.47 He says: In the account preferred by storytellers [. . .] an account that we willingly entertain when we read or listen to stories, storytellers (a) inhabit real beings and represent them from the inside, and also (b) by this process create them out of nothing and turn them into real beings. It is a paradoxical position, but it does appear to be a position of some importance to human societies, which, in a paradoxical movement of their own, both (a) entertain it, and (b) dismiss it as nonsense.48

By creating a fictional being, one who is (paradoxically) separate from the novelist though comes from ‘inside’ of him/her, Coetzee urges us to recognise that any responsibility for the story’s message, therefore, cannot be (entirely) placed on the novelist’s shoulders. In other words, he urges us to recognise the ‘wisdom’ of the novel itself, a wisdom that does not necessarily come from the

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individual but rather from some other liminal margin, perhaps from within the fiction itself. Costello may be a fictional being, a fictional novelist and whether consciously or unconsciously, she is imparting a wisdom in the form of lessons. In the first of her lessons: ‘Let me know turn to my subjects, “What is Realism?”’ (EC 18), Costello relates the story of Kafka’s ape, a story which sees the ape giving ‘a speech to a learned society. It is a speech, but a test too, an examination, a viva voce’ (EC 18). The text re-tells the story of Kafka’s ape; Costello explains that the ape has literally to ape the ‘manners and conventions’ (EC 18) of the society in order to gain entry into it and be accepted. However, as Costello is giving this lecture to audience who mirrors this learned society, then the story becomes a reflection of herself and her audience, the interpretation of which lies, once again, in the question of ‘who am I?’. Costello continues, we don’t know and will never know, with certainty, what is really going on in this story [. . .] There used to be a time when we knew. [. . .] But all that has ended. The word-mirror is broken irreparably, it seems. About what is really going on in the lecture hall your guess is as good as mine: men and men, men and apes, apes and men, apes and apes. [. . .] The words on the page will no longer stand up and be counted, each proclaiming ‘I mean what I mean!’ [. . .] This is the situation in which I appear before you. I am not, I hope, abusing the privilege of this platform to make ideal, nihilistic jokes about what I am, ape or woman, and what you are my auditors. That is not the point of the story, say I, who am, however, in no position to dictate what the point of the story is. There used to be a time, we believe, when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers speaking our parts. (EC 19)

Costello’s lecture points to the state of the novel today, to a state where even fiction cannot ‘mean’ anymore because the real is unrepresentable. If the novel is trying to represent the real – mimesis – and if, as Benjamin says, it contains ‘the meaning of life’,49 then Costello is telling us, depressingly, that there is none because, in the condition of postmodernity, the real has disappeared: As Baudrillard has argued: we are in a condition of ‘simulacra and simulations’.50 This is why Costello talks about the ‘word-mirror’ as being ‘broken’ and the fact that she is in no position to speak. The interpretative possibilities that are thrown up by the story – are we talking about ‘men and men, men and apes, apes and men, apes and apes’? – are in themselves pointless because the meaning of the story is inaccessible. The difficulty for the novelist, in presenting this story to an audience of ‘men’ as an interpretative possibility of his experience of the ‘real’, is further

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problematized by the fact that it is framed within a fiction, though as Baudrillard points out, the fictive is a more ‘honest’ representation than the simulation. To dissimulate is to pretend not have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: ‘Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms’ (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’.51

But Coetzee’s fictional play, which begins with the story of the ape and his audience, is further problematized in terms of the ‘real’ and the ‘fictive’ outside the world of the novel. In November 1996 Coetzee gave the first of a series of lectures at Bennington College as part of the Ben Belitt lectureship series. Here, Coetzee read Costello’s lesson on ‘Realism’ (in other words, chapter one of the novel) to an audience who were expecting a ‘conventional’ lecture, not a story or a parody of a novelist giving a lecture, parodying Kafka’s ape. Similarly, at a different venue and with an equally unexpecting audience, Coetzee repeated the process with another of Costello’s ‘lessons’. On 15 October 1997 Coetzee was due to give the first of two Tanner lectures on human values at Princeton University. His lecture ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’ (lesson three of Elizabeth Costello) comprised of distinguished members of the academy, who were expecting to hear J. M. Coetzee’s thoughts on the human values. But Coetzee’s thoughts on the subject were, once again, framed within a fiction. Derek Attridge, who was present at the second of these events, gives this following account: Although I don’t recall any audible reaction from the audience, there could be no doubt about the surprise produced by Coetzee’s opening words, spoken in his quiet, grave voice: ‘He is waiting at the gate when her flight comes in.’ No preliminary explanation, no introduction to prepare us for this clearly fictional statement, couched in the third-person present tense [. . .] and for those of us who thought this might be the familiar lecturer’s strategy of beginning with a quotation from another author, no break in the fictional tissue from henceforward to the end of the presentation. What made the event in which we were participating all the more disquieting was our gradual realization that it was being mirrored, in a distorted representation, in the fiction itself: the central character was revealed to be a novelist from the Southern Hemisphere who had been asked to give a lecture at an American college, and who had chosen

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to speak on the human treatment of animals. We listened to the lecture given within the fiction-itself a testing of the norms of academic debate. Coetzee’s final words, spoken in his fiction by the college president, could have been spoken by the chair of the real lecture we were attending: ‘We look forward to tomorrow’s offering.’52

If this was not ‘disquieting’ in itself, after the lecture was over and the audience began to approach Coetzee to ask questions or to comment on what he had presented, Coetzee continued to hide behind the mask of Costello. When members of the audience asked him questions which required his opinions about specific issues raised in his fictional lecture and which were, nevertheless, pertinent to the topic, Coetzee evaded giving a direct response. Instead of giving his own opinions, Coetzee chose to answer through the voice of Costello. In other words, his response did not begin with the words, ‘I agree, or I think . . .’, but rather with words similar to ‘Well, Elizabeth Costello would say this, or would say that . . .’53 It is no wonder, then, that the audience, as Attridge noted, felt disturbed. Particularly in the first lecture, where Coetzee told the story of Kafka’s ape, the audience would have realized they had become embroiled in a labyrinthine hall of mirrors from which it was difficult to find the way out. Returning now to the concept of realism and to Kafka’s ape, the narrator tells us: ‘Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no separate existence, can exist only in things’ (EC 9). In a sense, therefore, the novel is an experiment in disproving this conceptualization of realism, the notion that ideas can be ‘out there’, and not be premised in things. Coetzee uses the ‘realistic’ framework of Costello (the novelist) giving lectures to a live audience, to create the response that will lead the narrative to discuss these issues. But Coetzee’s play here rests on the slow revelation that this is all self-consciously assumed. We cannot believe in realism anymore because it does not really go to the core of our humanity – perhaps as the moral of the story does according to Benjamin, and who says the novel presents us with a quest for the meaning of life, but ultimately disappoints. Indeed, this terse relationship between the meaning of life and the moral of the story plays itself out in the final of Costello’s eight lessons. Lesson eight, ‘At the Gate’, takes place in a strange Kafkaesque world, a place which has no referents pointing to a time and place, but only a sign which signifies an entry point: the gate (EC 193). Here we meet Costello, who finds herself outside this gate seeking entry which, she learns, is gained through the provision of a statement of faith. She asks, ‘what if I am not a believer?’ (EC 194). Costello is not at the gates of ‘Heaven’ – this is a godless world – nevertheless, a faith and belief in something

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is deemed necessary. The reply she receives, from the anonymous man at the entry point, attests to this: ‘we all believe. We are not cattle. For each of us there is something we believe. Write it down, what you believe. Put it in a statement’ (EC 194). Costello’s reply ‘I am a writer [. . .] you have probably not heard of me here, but I write, or have written, under the name Elizabeth Costello. It is not my profession to believe, just to write. Not my business. I do imitations, as Aristotle would have said’ (EC 194). A little later, when standing before a panel of ‘judges’ (EC 198), the question of the meaning of her life, and her humanity is once again brought to the fore. Costello stands before the panel of nine ‘male and elderly’ (EC 198) judges and has to give account of herself. One of them asks twice: ‘Without beliefs we are not human. [. . .] What do you say to that, Elizabeth Costello?’ (EC 200). The narrator gives the question more emphasis by stressing the fact that the question is asked a second time not only by rewriting (re-telling) it but also by explicitly telling us that the judge ‘repeats’ it (EC 200). Of course, the point here is that a disembodied voice of a nameless judge asks a character in a (pseudo-realist) novel to qualify not only her own depiction but also her value as human, her ability to have humanity. The question is, of course, absurd. A character, a fiction cannot have humanity. She is not human. In her answer Costello asserts this, but also qualifies her role as a fictional being, thus qualifying her importance as a (novelist) character in this novel. Costello, says: ‘On my own humanity? Is that of consequence? What I offer to those who read me, what I contribute to their humanity, outweighs, I would hope, my own emptiness in that respect?’ (EC 201). The (fictional) novelist speaks and what she offers is something that does not relate to the question of her humanity, or even of her existence, but to that of the reader who reads her fictions. However, Coetzee’s text is a hall of mirrors. In reality, it is the narrator’s fictional game of realism that we are playing, for beyond the narrator lies the voice of the author. Costello’s ‘voice’ is a mediated voice. Her authenticity as speaker is also, ultimately, questionable. But this is the point. Costello, a fiction, questioning her own fictionality, which in turn questions what we do with our fictions: what place do they have? What place does the novelist occupy today? Through the voice of the narrator (albeit predominantly omniscient) Costello is talking about herself as a character in the novel we are reading. Coetzee’s texts, therefore, can do nothing but shatter the realist illusion that we are nevertheless reading as that very thing. And this is where Coetzee achieves his aim quoted earlier – the separation of ideas from things – if Costello is illusory, then she has no materiality, she is not a thing, but an idea.

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But the question of belief that Coetzee asks is also one about morality in a world without religion – as well as in the world of the novel. Here he echoes Benjamin. This is why the reference is made to Milosz who was known for what Michiko Kakutani observes is ‘his call for a literature grounded in moral, as well as aesthetic values’.54 The final lesson, therefore, moves away from conventional realism, to another fictional realm that takes us beyond the allegorical, towards the ‘psuedo-mystical’. This is Coetzee’s novel pushes, as we saw in Foe, out of its own boundaries and into the space of another: the novel moves to a place in which resides the wisdom tale. And it is from a place of wisdom where we might hear the storyteller speak. Costello returns us to the place of the novelist, to Aristotelian mimesis, to art representing life. Realism – a descendant of mimesis – has tried to show, because the narrator cannot tell – diegesis – anymore. Telling involves knowing the story and moving into the role of storyteller who tells a story that provides us not with ‘the meaning of life’, but with the point of the meaning of life, in other words, with the moral of the story. Costello’s answer, in which we find the assertion of her task as novelist, is, on one level, to keep showing – to keep imitating ‘like Aristotle’ and ‘Kafka’s ape’. However, on another, the narrator who narrates her, tells us about the breaking of the word-mirror, nudges us to wake up from the ‘lulling’ nature of the narrative which takes us into a world of illusions, showing us that there needs to be a (story)telling, that the novelist has to also remember to be a storyteller.

Notes 1 Michael S. Kochin, ‘Literature and Salvation in Elizabeth Costello Or How to Refuse to Be an Author in Eight or Nine Lessons’, English in Africa 34.1 (May 2007): 79. 2 J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Vintage, 2004). All subsequent in text quotations will be abbreviated to EC. 3 J. M. Coetzee, Summertime (London: Random House, 2009), 225. 4 J. M. Coetzee, ‘He and His Man’, Nobel Prize Lecture. 2003. www.nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-lecture-e.html. 5 Ibid. 6 I do not mean to imply here that Nobel Speeches follow some standard pattern or are written to rule, that would be absurd, particularly given the nature of the prize. This is only meant in the sense that one might expect some ‘individual’ and personal response of one that speaks as himself not through the voice of another (i.e. not through fiction).

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7 Extracts from his novel Elizabeth Costello were first performed in front of a live audience, who had been expecting Coetzee to give ‘a lecture’ on a topic. I will discuss in more detail this in the section below on Elizabeth Costello. 8 Coetzee, Summertime, 225. Beyond the context of his Nobel Lecture, this relationship between writer and fictional character has been a key preoccupation in most (if not all) of Coetzee’s novels. In one of his more recent novels Summertime, Coetzee investigates his own status as a Nobel-Prize-winning author – the idea that he is world-renowned and respected. The novel’s premise is that it is a biography of the ‘late’ John Coetzee, and a young English biographer’s quest to interview people who had known him particularly in the early formative years as a writer (1972–7). 9 J. M. Coetzee, ‘Introduction to Nobel Speech’, 2003. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 This is the full title of the Defoe’s novel and is quoted here from the following edition. All subsequent references from the novel will be taken from this edition and designated by an in-text quotation abbreviated to RC, followed by the page number. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe. Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 13 M. Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’ in Seán Burke (ed.), Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 245. 14 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), 9. According to Hayes, Coetzee has admitted to broadly ‘agreeing’ with Watt’s presentation of realism in this book. See Patrick Hayes, ‘An Author I Have Not Read’: Coetzee’s Foe, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and the Problem of the Novel’, The Review of English Studies. New Series 57 (2006): 230. 15 Derek Attridge, ‘Oppressive Silence’, in Karen Lawrence, (ed.), Decolonizing Tradition: New View of Twentieth Century British Literary Canons (The Board of Trustees, USA: University of Illinois, 1992), 220. 16 This is not to say that Coetzee doesn’t appreciate the fact that these texts are here, his childhood self clearly was inspired by reading. 17 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. 1st edn. 1966 (New York; London: Oxford University Press, 2000), 39. 18 Kermode says: ‘We have to distinguish between myths and fictions. Fictions can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive.’ Ibid. 19 Benjamin, Illuminations, 87. 20 The name John is yet another way in which Coetzee foregrounds the question of authorship: John, of course, being Coetzee’s first name. 21 Susan Van Zanten Gallagher, A Story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 222. qtd in Dominic Head, J. M. Coetzee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 9.

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Head, J. M. Coetzee, 9. Ibid. Kochin, English in Africa, 80. Benjamin, Illuminations, 99. Ibid. Ibid., 85–6. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 12. Ibid., 13. Benjamin, Illuminations, 86. Patrick Hayes, J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 246. Benjamin, Illuminations, 83. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 87. This essay first appeared in The Review of English Studies as a Prize Essay but a revised version appears in chapter 4 of Hayes’s later full-length study of Coetzee’s fiction. See Patrick Hayes, ‘“An Author I Have Not Read”: Coetzee’s Foe, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and the Problem of the Novel’. The Review of English Studies. New Series 57 (2006), 273–90; J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 106–29. Hayes, The Review of English Studies, 279. For specific interpretation of these critics, see Hayes, ibid. Ibid., 280. Hayes, J. M. Coetzee and the Novel, 112. Ibid. Ibid., 113. Ibid. The notion of real/reality, is of course, contentious and subject to debate, and may not exist at all. Hayes, The Review of English Studies, 230. Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage Random House, 1994), 71. J. M. Coetzee, ‘Fictional Beings’, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10.2 (2003): 134. This reminds us of Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony and his arguments vis-à-vis Dostoevsky’s characters which, as I revealed above, Coetzee also curiously used in one of his novels. See Bakthin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist and trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin & London: University of Texas Press, 1981. Coetzee, Philosophy, 134.

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49 Benjamin, Illuminations, 99. 50 This is a reference to the idea of simulacra and simulation as discussed in Jean Baudrillard’s book of the same name. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. 1st published 1994 (University of Michigan Press, 2006). 51 Ibid., 3. 52 Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 193. 53 I gleaned this information from Derek Attridge at a conference in St Andrews Scotland in 2004. 54 Biography. Czeslaw Milosz: 1911–2004. The Poetry Foundation Online. www. poetryfoundation.org/bio/czeslaw-milosz.

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Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. Penguin Classics. Intro and Trans. by N. J. Dawood. London: Penguin, 1973. Taneja, G. R. ‘Facts of Fiction: Haroun and the Sea of Stories’, in G. R. Taneja and R. K. Dhwan (eds), The Novels of Salman Rushdie. New Delhi: Indian Society for Commonwealth Studies/Prestige, 1992, 217–29. Tew, Philip. Jim Crace. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Tew, Philip, Fiona Tolan and Leigh Wilson, (eds). Writers Talk: Interviews with Contemporary British Novelists. London: Continuum, 2008. ‘The Centre for Studies of the Oral Tradition’. http://oraltradition.org/. Thurman, Judith. Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller. New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 1982. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Toelken, Barre. ‘“The Pretty Languages” of Yellowman: Genre, Mode and Texture in Navajo Coyote Narratives’, in Dan Ben-Amos (ed.), Folkore Genres. Austin: University of Texas, 1976, 93–123. Tredell, Nicolas. Conversations with Critics. Manchester: Carcanet, 1994. Trouard, Dawn. Eudora Welty: Eye of the Storyteller. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989. Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Vargas Llosa, Mario. The Storyteller. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Vickery, John B. ‘The Functions of Myth in John Barth’s Chimera’. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 38.2 (1992): 427. Wanning Harries, Elizabeth. ‘“Ancient Forms”: Myth, Fairy Tale, and Narrative in A. S. Byatt’s Fiction’, in Stephen Benson (ed.), Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008, 74–97. Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. London: Vintage Random House, 1994. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957. Waugh, Patricia. Practising Postmodernism Reading Modernism. London: Arnold, 1992. Webb, Caroline. ‘Forming Feminism: Structure and Ideology in Charades and “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”’. Hecate 29.1 (2003): 132–41. White, Hayden. The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore, London: John Hopkins University Press, 1987. Wilson, Edmund. The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature. London: W. H. Allen, 1952.

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Wilson, Epiphanius, ed. and trans. Egyptian Literature: Comprising Egyptian Tales, Litanies, Invocations, The Book of the Dead and Cuneiform Writings. New York, London: Colonial Press, 1901. Wilson, Sharon Rose. Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-tale Sexual Politics. Jackson: University Press of Mississipi, 1993. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Original publication 1922. New York: Cosimo, 2007. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. ‘Interview: Mario Vargas Llosa Speaks about Dictator Novels, Globalization, The Novel and Reverse Striptease’. Hotel Amerika 1.2 (Spring 2003): 27–37. Zelkowitz, Rachel. ‘Rushdie Gives Lectures about Literary Study, Nature of Life’. Atlanta, GA, 10 August 2004. Online Newspaper. The Emory Wheel. www.emorywheel.com/ archive/detail.php?n=20682. Ziegler, Heide. ‘The Tale of the Author: Or, Scheherazade’s Betrayal’. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 10.2 (1990): 82–8. Zipes, Jack. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. —. When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 2007, 1–32.

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Index academic criticism 3, 43, 158, 263, 267 academy, the 46, 47, 191, 262, 263, 274 The American Academy of Arts and Letters 104n. 28, 218n. 15 The American Academy of Arts and Sciences 218n. 15 Acton, T.A. 32n. 50 Aesop 77 aestheticism 119 age(s) ages of Man 102n. 5 Bronze Age 79, 80, 102n. 5 Golden Age 102n. 5 Heroic Age 102n. 5 Iron Age 102n. 5 Middle Age 17, 18, 28 Silver Age 102n. 5 Stone Age 79, 102n. 5 Africa 17, 25, 33n. 80, 39 Albania 17 al-Tabari 186n. 70 see also The Satanic Verses and Rushdie, Salman Albert, David H. 189n. 139 Alderson, Evan 31n. 22 Alfer, Alexa 251n. 13 Al-Madani, Yusur 212, 214, 220n. 64 Amalek (King) 130, 139n. 44 Amanuddin, Syed 141, 148, 181n. 2 Amazon(ian) 7, 59, 109, 110, 112, 126, 128, 130, 132 America 17 Andersen, Hans Christian 24, 238 see also fairy tale(s) Anderson, Benedict 131, 139n. 46 Imagined Communities (1991) 139n. 46 ‘imagined communities’ 131 Anglo-Saxon scop see bard, types of Apostle Paul 120, 129 Apter, Emily 185n. 54

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Arabian Nights, The see The Thousand and One Nights Arcadia 102n. 5 see also Utopia archetype(s) 18, 129, 195 Jungian 13 Aristotle 15 Aristophanes 15 Armenia 26 artist 17, 94, 97, 118, 249 artist as outcast 78, 96, 97, 118 poet-artist 97, 119 (see also poet) woman artist 224 (see also feminism gender) artisan(s) 39, 53, 66, 87, 92 artisan practice 47 (see also craft) Asia 17, 39 Athanassakis, Apostolos N. 30n. 8 Attar, Farid Ud-Din (Attar of Nashapur) 167 The Conference of Birds (1177) 142, 165, 167 (see also religion Sufism) Attridge, Derek 260, 270, 274, 275, 278n. 15, 280n. 52 Attwell, David 270 Atwood, Margaret Eleanor (1939– ) 46–9, 65, 70n. 48, 86, 104n. 31 Negotiating with the Dead (2002) 46, 70n. 48 audience 6, 15, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, 39, 41, 42, 47, 48, 55, 56, 59, 81, 82, 84, 88–91, 97–100, 114, 115, 124, 150, 153, 158, 169–70, 173, 192, 193, 201–2, 206, 208–12, 215–7, 228, 229, 232, 242, 243 adult audience 169, 170, 173 global audience 159 listening audience /of listeners 114, 192, 193, 202, 216, 217, 242 see also Barth, John listener performance reader, readership Australia 28

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294

Index

authenticity 53, 54, 56, 57, 66, 93, 113, 115, 123, 144, 258, 276 authentic speaker/storyteller/ voice 42, 51, 54, 55, 57, 66, 93, 123, 143, 179, 268, 276 inauthenticity 50, 51, 113, 127 author 1–12 passim 23, 45, 48–51, 56, 59, 64, 78, 93, 110, 112, 116, 123–5, 135–8, 150, 154, 162, 164, 171, 194, 204–5, 207, 212, 226, 238, 245, 249, 255–63, 268, 276 see also writer, novelist authorship 4, 23, 67, 116, 154, 224, 256–9 ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967)/ authorial death 48, 71n. 53, 117 (see also Barthes, Roland) ‘What is an Author?’ (1969) (see Foucault, Michel) authority (concept of) of the individual 50, 145 of male/ men 225, 245 in relation to author 67, 116, 178, 269 in relation to storyteller 2, 16, 19, 25, 30n. 2, 66, 67, 83, 125, 191, 192, 224, 228 autobiography/ -ical/ -er 141, 148, 149, 154, 159, 206, 213 Awn, Peter 160, 186n. 64 Azerbaijan 26 Baena, Rosalia 168–71, 187n. 92 Baghdad 8 Bahia 133 Bakhtin, Mikhail 279n. 47 Balbo, Count Cesare 137n. 23 Balkans, the 17, 31 bard(s) see also bardic tradition storyteller, types of Anglo-Saxon scop 17 Celtic bard 17, 18, 19, 38, 52 Gaelic bard 19 Kazakh bard 26 Persian bard 25, 26 Russian bard 18 Scandinavian scald 17 Barnard, Rita 53, 54, 72n. 71 Barnes, Julian (1946– ) 85

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Barth, John (1930– ) 6, 8, 57, 58, 61, 136n. 3, 191–220 and the audience 208–12 The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories (2004) 197 Chimera (1972) 192, 196, 218n. 13 Coming Soon!!! A Narrative (2001) 197 Every Third Thought (2011) 218n. 14 The Floating Opera (1956) 194, 219n. 28 and the frame-tale 200–8 The Friday Book (1984) 218nn. 1, 12, 219nn. 17, 18, 24, 25, 30, 220nn. 42, 53, 63, 221nn. 71, 74 Further Fridays (1995) 218n. 4, 220nn. 59, 66, 221n. 76 The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991) 8, 73n. 90, 191–220, 239 ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ (1967) 195, 197 ‘The Literature of Replenishment’ (1980) 197, 218n. 1, 219nn. 18, 30–1 Lost in the Funhouse (1968) 196, 218n. 15 ‘Muse spare me’ (1984) 219n. 24 On with the Story (1996) 197 Once upon a Time (1994) 197 and postmodernism 8, 192–217 The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) 195 ‘Tales within Tales within Tales’ (1981) 207 Barthes, Roland 48, 71n. 53 ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) (see author) Basile, Giambattista 24 Bates, Alfred 17, 31n. 21 Batty, Nancy 151, 152, 183nn. 26, 27 Baudrillard, Jean (1929–2007) 273, 274, 280n. 50 Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906–1989) 42, 199, 260 Benaziza, Lahsen 196 Bengali 26 Benjamin, Walter (1892–26) 1, 2, 5, 8, 13, 32, 35–68, 69n. 4, 71n. 60, 75n. 125, 77, 79, 83–93, 100–1, 171, 181, 182n. 10, 184n. 43, 188n. 112, 209, 215, 219n. 36, 224, 225, 236, 255, 266, 269, 273, 277

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Index Illuminations (2007) 10, 13, 35, 68n. 1, 69nn. 5, 8, 17, 21, 23, 70nn. 25, 36, 42, 44, 75n. 125, 76n. 132, 103nn. 14, 27, 104nn. 36, 40, 105nn. 51, 53, 61, 107nn. 83, 90, 111, 191, 220n. 60, 223, 252n. 32, 278n. 19, 279nn. 25, 30, 32 ‘The Storyteller’ (1936) 1ff, 9–10, 35, 68n. 1, 114, 118, 127, 128–9, 143, 153, 154–5, 218n. 11, 252n. 32, 274 Benson, Stephen 58, 64, 73nn. 93, 97, 75n. 120, 76n. 136, 192, 196, 200, 206, 218nn. 6, 9, 219n. 40, 220n. 51, 251n. 11 Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale, Theory (2003) 58, 73nn. 93, 97, 75n. 120, 76n. 134, 218nn. 6, 9, 219nn. 26, 40, 220n. 51 Berndt, Ronald Murray 34n. 83 Bible, the 29 Hebrew Bible 15 and the New Testament 29 Bildungsroman 88, 192 Biolsi, Thomas 34n. 81 birth see also rebirth of the storyteller 77–93 (see also Crace, Jim) Blake, William 161 Blaser, Robin 31n. 22 Bloom, Harold 47 Boccaccio, Giovani (113–175) 21 The Decameron 21, 22, 23, 24, 58, 105n. 50 Booker, Keith 113, 118, 127, 132, 144, 154, 182n. 14, 183n. 33 Vargas Llosa among the Postmodernists (1994) 136n. 1, 138, 139 Børdhal, Vibeke 25, 33n. 78 Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986) 195 Bradbury, Malcolm 192, 218n. 6 Braid, Donald 21 Brazil 133 Brewer, Derek 47, 70n. 49 Britain 20 British economy 93 British Fiction 104n. 28 British History 156 Brooks, Peter 50, 54, 71n. 60, 72n. 76 Brown, Kevin 207, 220n. 55

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Bruner, Jerome 64, 75n. 119 Buddhist Scriptures 15 see also religion Bunbury, Frances Johanna Lady 137n. 23 see also Count Cesaro Burke, Seán 71n. 53, 278n. 13 Burton, Richard Francis Sir (1821– 1890) 215 Buschini, Marie-Pascal 233, 251n. 24 Byatt, Antonia Susan (1936–) 6, 8, 73n. 92, 223–54, 267, 268 Caught a Story (1992) 250n. 2 The Children’s Book (2009) 226–7 Degrees of Freedom (1965) 251n. 9 The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994) 8, 10, 12, 223ff ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ 221 ‘Dragon’s Breath’ (1992) 250n. 2 and the fairy tale 229–34 and feminism/gender 223–6, 234–8, 246–9 On Histories and Stories (2000) 251n. 15, 251n. 19 Morpho Eugenia (1992) 226 Possession (1990) 226, 250n. 2, 250n. 8 Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011) 227 and self-consciousness 226–9 The Shadow of the Sun (1964) 226 Still Life (1985) 226 Calvino, Italo (1923–1985) 58, 59, 74n. 107, 104n. 31, 195, 198, 199 Canetti, Elias 25, 33n. 66 Canon, the 86, 195, 257, 260, 261 Canterbury Tales, The (1386– 95) see Chaucer, Geoffrey Cashinahua tribe 59 Chambers, Ross 50, 71n. 60 Chartier, Roger 50 Chaurasia, Radley Shyam 33n. 71 Chaucer, Geoffrey (1343–1400) 22, 23, 47, 48, 77, 241, 245 The Canterbury Tales (1386–95) 22, 23, 24, 47, 227, 228, 241 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1860– 1904) 185n. 55 China 24, 26 Christianity see religion chronicler see storyteller/ storytelling

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Index

Cicero 15 Cinderella (fairy tale) 24, 33n. 61, 177, 240 Clark, Timothy 30, 31, 106n. 70 Coetzee, J.M. (1940– ), 6, 7, 9, 10, 68, 86, 104n. 31, 255–80 Age of Iron (1990) 256 and the author 256–62 Boyhood: Scenes from a Provisional Life 256 and the concept of wisdom and the wisdom tale 268–74 Diary of a Bad Year (2007) 256 Disgrace (1999) 256 Dusklands (1974) 256 Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003) 9, 255–80 Foe (1986) 256, 259 ‘He and his Man’ (2003) 256, 257, 258 Master of Petersburg (1994) 256 in relation to realism and the novel 262–8 Slow Man (2005) 256 Summertime (2009) 256, 278n. 8 Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) 256 Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002) Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834) 227, 249 Connoly, Cyril 47 Conrad, Joseph (1857–1924) 72n. 74, 185n. 55 Heart of Darkness (1899, 1902) 53, 72n. 74, 114 Corcoran, Marlena G. 160, 186n. 69 Coward, Harold G. 31n. 22 Cox, Alison M. 189n. 139 Crace, Jim (1946– ) 6, 68, 77–102, 102nn. 1, 4, 103nn. 9–26, 104nn. 28–39, 105nn. 58, 61, 106n. 67, 107n. 89, 110, 117, 119, 122, 126, 132, 135, 138n. 37, 182n. 11 Being Dead (1999) 104n. 28 Continent (1988) 104n. 28 The Gift of Stones (1988) 6, 77–102, 102n. 1, 104n. 28, 120 Quarantine (1997) 104n. 28 Signals of Distress (1995) 104n. 28 craft 14–22 passim, 28, 46, 78–100 passim, 115, 129, 230, 255 see also artisan practice

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craftsman(ship) 38, 39, 44, 45, 79–84, 88, 91 Croatia 17 cultural producer 9, 51, 52, 60, 72n. 74, 143, 158, 224, 225, 227, 234, 236, 250, 253n. 55, 263, 268, 269 culture(s) 4, 5, 11–12, 14, 15, 17, 21, 27, 28, 31n. 20, 39, 43, 50, 64, 74n. 107, 79, 110, 120, 127, 134 aboriginal cultures 28 Aztec cultures 17 high/low/mass cultures 25, 26, 57, 58, 72nn. 71, 74 Incan cultures 17 oral cultures 16, 26, 43, 44, 53, 54, 57 postcolonial cultures 3, 4 print culture 2, 45, 49, 50, 52, 76n. 129, 224 storytelling cultures 27, 28, 120 Damrosch, David 10–11 Dante, Alighieri (1265–1321) 22, 77, 112, 113, 117–20, 137n. 23 The Divine Comedy (c.1308) 119 Paradiso 119, 137n. 26 Purgatorio 119 David (biblical: the Jewish King) 130 Davis, Mary E. 135, 138n. 36, 140n. 52 Davis, Robert Murray 218n. 7 ‘Death of the Author, The’ see author Defoe, Daniel (c.1660–1731) 127, 144, 258, 259, 266 The History of the Devil (1726) 161, 182n. 12, 186n. 71 Robinson Crusoe (1719) 127, 154, 260, 266, 270, 278n. 12 Dégh, Linda 141 Delargy, James H. 20, 32n. 38, 236 democracy of the storyteller 146 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004) 67, 68 Dissemination (1981) 67 On Grammatology (1974) 76n. 131 Deusen, Kira Van 28 devil 29, 121, 124, 129, 137n. 31, 160, 161, 186n. 70 see also Satan dialect(s) 23, 119, 127 dialectic 156 Indo-English dialects 175–6 Neapolitan dialect 24

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Index dialogism/gic 21, 41, 74n. 107, 89, 192, 215, 217 see Bakthin, Mikhail Dickens, Charles (1812–1870) 51, 154, 224 Dinesen, Isak (Karen Blixen) (1885– 1962) 141 djinn (or jinn) 160, 244–8, 253n. 55 Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, The (1994) see Byatt, A.S. Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821–1881) Crime and Punishment (1866) 269–70, 278n.14, 279n. 35 Dundes, Alan 24, 33n. 61 Durix, Pierre 172, 179, 180, 188n. 117, 189nn. 136, 141 Dutheil, Martine Hennard 161, 162, 186n. 72 Eden 79, 83, 102n. 5, 119, 122, 124, 132, 228 see also Utopia Eighteenth century, the 25, 50, 51, 127, 154, 252n. 40, 266 El Hablador (1987) 11n. 7, 136n. 1 see also Vargas Llosa, Mario, The Storyteller Eliot, T.S. (1888–1965) 43 Elizabeth Costello (2003) see Coetzee, J.M. embedding see narrative embedding English aesthetic 52 Enlightenment, the 114, 127, 204, 271 epic, the 19, 26, 31n. 12, 39, 105n. 61, 184n. 36, 226 epic poetry, poets 17, 18, 23, 240 epic singer 17, 39, 65 epic tradition 17 see Homer, Homeric epic Ernst, Charles A.S. 197, 219n. 29 Euripides 15, 227 Europe 17, 25, 38, 39, 117, 127 Eastern Europe 21 European imagination 128 European literature/ tradition 117, 118 see also literature; tradition European novel(s) 156 Western Europe 18 exile 35, 94, 97, 112, 117–20, 140n. 47, 144, 161, 163 experience in relation to Benjamin 1, 40–9 passim, 53, 60, 66, 69n. 24, 87–8, 90, 100, 101, 143, 269

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297 shared/collective experience 23, 96, 99–101, 172, 174, 175

Fagan, Brian M. 28, 34n. 82 fairy tale(s) 13, 169, 171, 177, 179, 180, 225, 226, 228–53 passim, 268 adult fairy tale 8, 223 Cinderella 177 fairy-tale collections 24, 238 feminist fairy tale 58 fairy-tale formula 150, 204, 229, 247 literary fairy tale 24, 33n. 62, 238, 252n. 45 Red Riding Hood 177 revisionist fairy tale 58, 224 Sleeping Beauty 240 Tom Thumb 177 see also Byatt, A.S.; storyteller, types of tradition Felman, Shoshana 44, 70n. 39 feminism 253n. 55 see also A.S. Byatt; fiction, feminist; gender feminist criticism 225 (see Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan) fiction feminist fiction 58 Modernist Fiction (1992) 70n. 46 (see Randall, Stevenson) postmodern(ist) fiction 57, 58, 61–2, 104n. 30 realist fiction 45, 198 Talk Fiction (2001) 72n. 77 (see Kacandes, Irene) Victorian fiction 49, 52, 143 Flaubert, Gustav (1821–1880) 135, 138n. 36 Florence 110, 112, 117, 119 Flower, Dean 180, 189n. 140 Foe (1986) see Coetzee, J.M. folktale(s) 13, 14, 21, 58, 59, 67, 73n. 93, 86, 141, 149, 152, 172, 173, 184n. 36, 195, 230, 235–7, 239–40 Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale, Theory (2003) (see Benson, Stephen) Foucault, Michel (1926–1984) 260, 278n. 13 ‘What is an Author?’ (1969) 278n. 13 frame narratives see narrative; narrative embedding France 50 French literature 50

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298

Index

Frank, Arthur W. 97, 98, 100, 101, 106n. 75, 107n. 85 Frankenstein (1813) see Shelley, Mary Fredericks, Linda 180, 189n. 139 Freedom of Speech see Rushdie, Salman Freud, Sigmund (1956–1939) 248 Frey, Rodney 27, 34n. 81 Friedman, Susan Stanford 219n. 37 Gallagher, Susan Van Zanten 264, 278n. 21 Galland, Antoine 12n. 8 Gaul/s 15, 17, 18 Gaunt, Simon (ed.) 31n. 25 Geddes, Jennifer L. 136n. 4 gender and the storyteller (see Byatt, A.S.) genius 96, 106n. 70, 118, 160, 186n. 69 individual genius 114, 118, 136, 229 Germany 17 Gide, André (1869–1951) 95 Philoctète (1899) 95 Gift of Stones, The (1988) see Crace, Jim Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan 225, 250n. 5 see also feminism The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) 225, 250n. 5 Glasser, Perry 87, 104n. 39 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749– 1832) 10, 124 and the concept of Weltliteratur 10 The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) 124 Golding, William Gerald Sir (1911–1993) The Inheritors (1955) 79 Gottschall, Jonathan 64, 75n. 121 man as a storytelling animal 62, 64, 116, 125, 145 The Storytelling Animal (2012) 75n. 121 Gould, Stephen Jay 63, 74n. 111 grand narratives see narrative Grass, Günter/ Gunther (1927– ) 104n. 31 Graziosi, Barbara 16, 30n. 9 Greece (ancient) 21, 31, 95 Greeks, the (ancient) 18, 94 Greene, Ellin 175, 188n. 120, 189nn. 125–6 Greenwood, Gillian 103n. 26 Grimm Brothers, the 24, 227, 238 Gustafsson, Ulla 106n. 75

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Hale, Thomas A. 33n. 80 Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) see Rushdie, Salman Harries, Elizabeth Wanning 226, 251n. 11 Hassan, Ihab 62, 74n. 109 The Postmodern Turn (1987) 74n. 109 Hatchard, Luis de Juan 154, 183n. 30 historian as storyteller see storyteller history of the storyteller, the 14–29 Hayes, Patrick 267, 269, 271, 278n. 14, 279n. 31 Head, Dominic 265, 278n. 21 Heart of Darkness (1899) see Conrad, Joseph Heath, R. 253n. 48 Hell 119, 122 Hesiod 102n. 2 Hewson, Kelly 147, 151, 182n. 20 Hinduism see religion, types of Hitler, Adolf (1885–1945) 35, 139n. 44, 185n. 51 Hitler Speaks (1939) 139n. 44 Hogan, Patrick Colm 64, 75n. 118, 89, 105n. 45, 107n. 88 Holoquist, Michael 270 Homer 16, 17, 30n. 7, 38, 77 Homeric epic 16 Homeric tradition 16 ‘The Hymn to Apollo’ 16, 30 hybridity 7, 146, 162 Inca see culture, Incan India 26, 140n. 47, 142, 150, 151, 156, 158, 159 Indian fiction 156, 163 Indian history 146, 148, 155, 173 (see also Wolpert, Stanley) Indian literature 156 India’s independence 148 identity 6, 7, 59, 109, 111 identity politics 7 individual and collective/ communal 43, 78, 112, 117, 155, 171, 173, 180, 233 individuality 82, 133, 229, 267, 271 individual talent 43, 77, 138 see also genius; originality intellectual 47, 51, 225, 250, 268 public intellectual 9

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Index Irwin, Robert 12, 25 The Arabian Nights: A Companion (2004) 12, 33n. 68 Ishiguro, Kazuo (1954– ) 85 Islam see religion, types of; and tradition, Islamic Israel, Niko 164, 187n. 83 Jackson, Michael 163, 164, 187n. 78 The Politics of Storytelling (2006) 163, 187n. 78 Jakobson, Roman (1896–1982) 198 Japan 26, 29 Jew/s, Jewish People 109, 126, 128, 129 see also religion Judaism 29, 129 Johnson, B.S. 86 Joyce, James (1842–1941) 42, 263 Ulysses (1922) 42, 263 Kacandes, Irene 56, 77 Kafka, Franz (1883–1924) 124, 138n. 36, 273, 274, 276 The Metamorphosis (1915) 124 Kakutani, Michiko 277 Karmacheti, Indira 155, 184n. 35 Kathasaritsagara, The see also Haroun and the Sea of Stories; Rushdie, Salman Kay, Sarah (ed.) 31n. 25 Kaye, M.M. (1908–2004) The Far Pavilions (1978) 185n. 48 Kermode, Frank 261, 278n. 17 and degenerate myths 261, 266 Kerr, Lucille 116, 136n. 5 Khomeini, Ayatollah 158 Knight, Jean O’Bryant 112, 124, 136n. 7, 137n. 34 Koch, John T. 32 Kochin, Michael 256, 279n. 24 Koff, Leonard M. 23, 32n. 55 Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling (1988) 23 Korea 26 Kreilkamp, Ivan 1, 10, 35, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 66, 69n. 16, 70n. 52, 71nn. 54, 64, 69, 86, 114, 143, 178, 223, 224, 225 Voice of the Victorian Storyteller (2005) 10, 70n. 52, 71nn. 54, 64,

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299

69, 72nn. 70, 74, 76n. 128, 104n. 35, 136n. 13, 250n. 4 Kuhns, Richard F. 22, 24, 32n. 51, 33n. 65 Decameron and the Philosophy of Storytelling (2005) 22 Kulturkritik 267 Kuortti, Joel 146, 181n. 8, 182n. 17, 185n. 53 Lagos-Pope, María-Inés 119, 137n. 25 Lakoff, Tolmach 55, 56, 73n. 83 Lane, Edward 12n. 8 Lane, Helen (Translator of Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller) 136n. 1 Lane, Richard J. 84, 87, 88, 90, 92, 103n. 16, 104n. 38, 105nn. 42, 49, 59 Lawless, Andrew 85, 86, 103n. 22, 104n. 31, 105n. 44 Lawrence, Karen 278n. 15 Leavis, F.R. 47, 70n. 35 leitwörter leitsätze 245 Leskov, Nikolai (1831–1895) 35–42, 49, 53, 69n. 20, 85 reference to stories by Leskov 69n. 20 Leslie, Esther 38, 68n. 4 Lesser, Simon O. 63, 74n. 112 Lessing, Doris (1919–2003) 65, 75n. 126 Lingham, Rod (ed.) 103n. 16 Lipscomb, David 156, 184n. 40 listener see also audience; reader literature (type of/ period) British literature 52 children’s literature 169, 177–9, 188n. 100 eighteenth century literature 52 French literature 50 Indian literature 26, 156 Latin literature 15 Literature of Exhaustion’ (see Barth, John) Literature of Replenishment’ (see Barth, John) minority literature 146 nineteenth-century literature 52, 147 Pre-Christian and Latin literature 15 Renaissance literature 21 Romantic Literature 122 world literature 10, 159 (see also Weltliteratur)

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300

Index

Lo Cunto de li Cunte (The Tale of Tales) 24 Lord, Albert B. 16, 31, 214, 221n. 69 The Singer of Tales (1960) 17, 31 Lucchetti, Irene 32n. 42 Lyotard, Jean-François (1924–1998) (and) grand narratives 2, 29, 59, 60, 62, 66, 135, 145 The Postmodern Condition (1979) 59 Maack, Annegret 227, 245, 248, 251n. 13, 254n. 57 Mac Cana, Proinsias 32n. 37 Mahabharata, The 26, 33n. 72 see also Sanskrit tradition Mahdi, Muhdin 12n. 8 marginalization, marginalized 6, 96, 110, 117, 121, 126 Márquez, Gabriel García (1927– ) 198, 199 One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) 198 Matthews, Sean 86, 104n. 29 McCole, John 44, 70n. 43 McEwan, Ian 85, 86, 104n. 31 McHale, Brian 73n. 105, 104n. 30, 198–9, 200, 213, 219n. 35, 220n. 65 McKean, Thomas A. 19, 32n. 36 Mediterranean 25 Medwar, P.B. 60–1 memory cultural memory 35, 36, 38, 102n. 6 historical memory 39 in relation to Benjamin 87–8 metamorphosis/ transformation 116, 119, 120, 124, 131, 159–62 ‘The Metamorphosis’ (1915) (see Kafka, Franz) Midnight’s Children (1981) see Rushdie, Salman migrant, migrancy 160–1, 177 Rushdie as migrant 158 as storyteller 143 Miller, J. Hillis 103n. 25 Millington, Mark I. 137n. 30 Milosz, Czeslaw 277, 280n. 54 Milton, John (1606–1674) 161, 233 Areopagitica (1644) 180 Paradise Lost (1667) 124, 227, 233 mimesis 273, 277 Aristotelian 277

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Modernism / modernity 62, 134 modernist 35 monstrosity 120, 121 monster (see also Frankenstein’s monster) Monteith, Sharon 251n. 14, 254n. 63 Moretti, Franco 50, 71n. 58 Mother Goose, Old 13, 24, 33n. 64 Muhammed 160 Mukherjee, Meenakshi 156, 184n. 44 Mundy, Gary 32n. 50 Muñoz, Braulio 137n. 33 Murdoch, Iris (1919–1999) 226 Muses, the 16, 18, 30n. 12 myth 2, 10, 18, 28, 70n. 35, 77, 78, 85, 94–6, 103n. 26, 106n. 63, 118–33 passim, 149, 160, 184n. 36, 223–30 passim, 261, 278n. 18 (de)mythologized storyteller 6, 7, 10, 39, 51, 67, 87, 94, 111, 115, 131, 133, 135, 271 mythology 2, 14, 39, 42, 66, 106n. 68, 128, 135, 146, 226, 227, 236, 262 see also Kermode Frank degenerate myths Narayan, Kirin 33n. 74 narrative narrative death 194, 201, 214, 239, 240 narrative embedding 195, 205, 207, 208, 212, 216, 224, 233, 245 frame narrative 6, 21, 90, 113, 115, 120, 194, 208, 230 grand narrative 2, 29, 59–66, passim, 135, 145 narrative life/ existence 201, 204, 239, 240, 244 little narrative (petits récits) 60, 145 metanarratives 59, 60 ‘narrative men’ (Todorov) 8, 204, 212 oral/ spoken narrative 68, 138n. 37, 143, 147, 149, 182n. 9 quest narrative 101 narrative tradition(s) 6, 8, 11n. 6, 138n. 37, 203, 210, 224, 225, 230, 260 written narrative 148 narrator frame (tale) narrator 201, 202, 211 as novelist 7 as storyteller 170, 214

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Index nation (al) (see also ethnos) Neanderthals 79 Neolithic era 79 Nesbitt, Elizabeth 189n. 125 Nettleton, Sarah 106n. 75 New Testament see The Bible Newman, Jenny 251n. 14, 254n. 63 Nickolajeva, Maria 169, 188nn. 100, 102 nineteenth century, the 10, 35, 52, 154, 156, 240 Noakes, Jonathan 227, 251n. 12 Noble, Michael, J. 251n. 13 noble savage see Rousseau Nodelman, Perry 188n. 101 novel, the American novel 192, 210, 218n. 6 European novel 156 Indian novel 156, 182n. 9 parabolic novel 85 realist novel 179, 232, 276 novelist(s) 1–11, 36, 40–4 see also storyteller as novelist novelistic realism see realism Ocean of the Streams of Story 142, 166 see also Kathasaritsagara Odysseus 94 One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) see Márquez, Gabriel García Ong, Walter 31, 53, 54, 55, 57, 72n. 73, 73n. 89, 176, 177, 178, 179, 189nn. 130, 134, 138 see also orality oral narratives see narrative; tradition oral tradition, the see tradition orality 38, 43, 51, 54, 57, 90, 124, 170, 175, 192, 255 orality and literacy 189nn. 130, 134, 138 primary orality 57 secondary orality 31n. 14, 53–7 passim simulated/staged orality 48, 54, 57, 58 see also Ong, Walter Oriental 112 originality 59, 118, 195, 266, 271 see also individuality outcast see storyteller and; storytelling and exile Ovid The Metamorphoses 102n. 5

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301

Pacific Islands, the 17 Paige, Nicholas 49, 50, 52, 55, 71nn. 55–61 parabolic novel see novel Park, Clara Clairborne 180, 188n. 107, 189n. 145 Parry, Milman 17, 31, 214, 221n. 69 Pellowski, Anne 14, 29, 30, 90, 172, 188n. 97 The World of Storytelling (1990) 14, 15, 16, 18, 29, 30, 31, 33nn. 69, 73, 75, 34nn. 86, 89, 43, 105n. 46, 181n. 5, 252n. 28, 253n. 48 performance (oral) see orality; storytelling Perrault, Charles 24, 237 Persia 26 see also bard; Conference of Birds Peru 109, 112, 131, 137n. 14 Petrarch 22 Philoctetes 94, 95, 96, 99, 101, 106n. 66, 118, 119, 120 Piciucco, Pier Paulo 152, 183n. 28 Pinault, David 189n. 137 Pindar 15 Plato 15 Plutarch Lives 124 poet see artist, writer, novelist Tang Dynasty Poets 11 Postcolonialism Post-colonial culture 3, 4 Postmodernism 3, 48, 61, 73n. 91, 194 The Postmodern Turn (1987) (see Hassan, Ihab) postmodernity 59, 60, 61, 257, 261, 266, 273 see also fiction; John Barth; novel; storyteller Poznar, Susan 197, 219n. 28 Pradesh, Andhra 26 Prize(s) Arts Council Writers Award 185n. 49 Booker Prize 104n. 28, 146, 157 E.M. Forster Award (American Academy of Arts and Letters) 104n. 28 European Literature prize 228 GAP International Prize For Fiction (USA) 104n. 28 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 104n. 28 James Tait Black Memorial Prize 185n. 49

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Index

The National Book Critics’ Circle Fiction Award (USA) 104n. 28 Nobel Prize 257, 258, 259 Premio Antico Fattore (ITALY), 104n. 28 Whitbread Novel Award 104n. 28 Winifred Holtby Memorial 104n. 28 prophet 28, 39, 92, 119, 120, 130, 131, 139n. 41, 185n. 70 Muhammed 160 prophecy 28, 29, 95, 119, 139n. 41, 236 Samuel 130 Provence 18 Pulman, Philip 46 Qu’ran, the Holy 160 Ramayana, The 26, 33n. 71 Rauschning, Hermann 139 reader see also listener reading aloud (see orality; speech and writing debates) readership 10n. 3, 36 American readership 210 (non) critical readership 192, 209 popular readership 209, 216 realism(t) 8, 86, 193, 198, 210, 211, 230, 247 magic realism 86 novelistic realism 8, 66, 110, 210, 211, 228, 262, 264, 265, 271 post-war realism 86 realist book(s)/novel(s) 89, 179, 212, 232 fiction 45, 198 magic realist 86, 104n. 30, 199 narrative 58 practices/modes 192, 193, 208, 232 science 60 tradition 3, 152, 156 Red Riding Hood see fairy tale Reder, Michael 183n. 23, 184n. 38 religion, types of Christianity 29, 128, 129 Christian missionaries 128 Christian texts 160 see tradition Hinduism 29 Islam 29, 185n. 52, 186n. 69 Islamic faith 139 Islamic sources/texts 160 see tradition

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Jainism 29 Judaism 29, 130, 186n. 69 Jewish people, Jew(s) 68n. 6, 109, 126, 128, 129, 130, 139n. 44 see also King Solomon and King Saul Sikhism 29 Sufism 29 Renaissance, the 112, 117 Renk, Kathleen 253n. 55 retelling(s) 23, 39, 41, 53, 70n. 24, 84–5, 101, 142, 194, 206, 214, 233, 244, 268 Reynolds Margaret 227, 251n. 12 Robbe-Grillet 199 Roman Historians 17 Romani people 21, 32 Romantic Literature see literature Romanticism 132 romantic era 52 Rosenthal, Melinda 204, 215, 220n. 47, 221n. 73 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 114, 122, 137n. 32 Rowan, Arthur 18, 32 Rozsa, Karoly 80, 81, 103n. 11 Rushdie, Salman (1947– ) 6, 7, 67, 85, 86, 131, 135, 141–92, 228 Grimus (1975) 159 Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) 7, 73n. 82, 144, 163, 165ff Imaginary Homelands (1992) 76n. 133, 140 Joseph Anton (2012) 159, 161, 185nn. 50, 55, 186nn. 74, 77, 187nn. 80, 87 Midnight’s Children (1981) 7, 75, 142, 144, 146, 147, 152, 154, 155–6, 160, 162, 169, 170, 181n. 6, 182nn. 9, 18, 19, 183n. 30, 184n. 35 ‘Outside the Whale’ (1984) 157 and ‘The Rushdie Affair’ 157ff, 200 The Satanic Verses (1988) 142, 144, 157–62, 167, 169, 180, 181nn. 6, 8, 182n. 12, 185n. 56, 186nn. 69–72 Shame (1983) 142 Step across this Line (2002) 186n. 70 Rushdie, Zafar 163–4, 165, 167, 168 Ryan, Patrick 30 Ryken, Leland 29, 34n. 88

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Index Sanskrit 30 Kathasaritsagara 142 Scriptures 15 Sansom, Ian 102, 103n. 23, 105n. 58, 107n. 91 Satan 144, 159, 160–2, 182n. 12, 186nn. 64, 69, 233 see also devil Iblis 160 Shaitan 186n. 69 Satanic Verses, The (1988) see Rushdie, Salman Saul (Jewish King) 129, 130 Scarry, Elaine 95, 106n. 65 Shattuc, Jane M. 55, 72n. 80 Scheherazade see The Thousand and One Nights Scholes, Robert 138 Schürer, Norbert 146, 182n. 18 Scott, Sir Walter 75n. 122 self-consciousness 86, 110, 192, 226, 228, 265, 269 Sen, Suchismita 175, 189n. 127 Setti, Ricardo A. 116, 137n. 20 Shahnama (The Book of Kings) 26 Shahryar (King) 151, 153 see also Scheherazade The Thousand and One Nights Sheba, Queen of 245 Shelley, Mary Frankenstein (1813) 121, 137n. 31 Shepherd, Ron 182n. 9 Simpson, David 74 Sleeping Beauty see fairy tale, the Smiley, Jane 85, 103n. 20 Solomon (the Jewish King) 129–30, 245 Sommer, Doris 130, 136n. 6, 139n. 45 Sontag, Susan 38, 69n. 7 Sophocles Philoctetes (409BC) 78, 94–101 passim Spain 25 speech/ writing debates 3, 6, 48, 52, 55, 68 Spivak, Shakravotry Gayatri as translator of Derrida’s On Grammatology (1997) 76n. 131, 270 Standish, Peter 129, 136–40 Stevenson, Randall 70n. 46 storyteller (s)/ storytelling archetypal storyteller 39, 87, 110, 133

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fairy-tale storyteller 24, 39, 226, 235, 236, 247 female storyteller 224, 226, 227, 229, 232 as healer/ and healing 18, 19, 100, 101, 146, 157, 164, 168, 169, 188n. 97 historian/ history-teller/ chronicler 19, 39, 75n. 125 postmodern storyteller 66, 191–217, 218n. 7, 219n. 35 primitive storyteller 109, 113, 115, 118 religious storyteller 29 storyteller-ess 223–54 tribal storyteller 7, 110, 112–14, 117, 118, 128 wounded storyteller 77, 94–102 see also audience; bard; listener; Scheherazade; storytelling performance storytelling and death 1, 5, 41, 43–8, 78–101 passim, 193, 194, 201–17 passim, 234, 239–54 passim see also narrative death as epistemology 28, 146 and exile 116 and monstrosity 120 performance 20, 89, 91, 151, 153, 167, 173, 175, 192, 195, 198, 208–12, 232, 257 post-modern storytelling 48, 53, 194–5 pre-modern storytelling 48, 53 and survival 78, 194, 217, 234 storytelling tradition(s)/ storytellers see also tradition bardic storytelling tradition 19, 38, 119, 209, 235 Buddhist 26 Celtic 28 Chinese 26 Eastern 240 Gaelic 19, 32n. 36, 236 Hindu 26, 28, 29 Irish 28 Maori 28 religious 26, 29 Romani 21 Siberian Shaman 28 Turkish 25

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304

Index

Stout, Mira 251n. 8 post-structuralism 68 Sunday School Movement 29 Swift, Graham (1949– ) 65, 75nn. 123, 125, 85 Waterland (1983) 75n. 125 tales within tales 207, 216, 228 see also narrative embedding Teverson, Andrew 167, 187n. 93, 189n. 144 textuality 2, 3, 43, 45, 255 intertextuality 227, 232, 233 Tew, Philip 75n. 123, 81, 85, 86, 93, 96, 101, 102, 103nn. 9–26, 104nn. 33–9, 105n. 60, 107n. 89, 92 Thatcher 93 the frame-tale(s) 12n. 8, 25, 50, 68, 194, 200, 212, 227, 233, 245 The Gift of Stones see Crace, Jim ‘The Metamorphosis’ (1915) see Kafka, Franz The Storyteller see Vargas Llosa, Mario The Thousand and One Nights The Arabian Nights 197, 212 The Nights 11–12, 151, 179, 180, 191, 192–217 passim, 233, 239 Scheherazade 8, 102n. 3, 141, 151, 152, 180, 191ff, 227, 233–4, 239, 249, 251n. 26, 253n. 55 Todorov, Tzvetan 8, 203, 204, 207, 212, 215, 220nn. 44, 56, 239, 241, 253n. 47 see also frame tale, narrative embedding Toelken, Barre 188n. 116 tradition(s) Christian traditions 160 European tradition 24, 58, 118 fairy-tale traditions 8, 235 folk(tale) tradition 171, 235 Islamic tradition 160, 246 literary tradition 1, 3, 4, 5, 21, 35, 42, 47, 48, 70n. 35, 79, 117, 121, 127, 135, 146 novelistic tradition 43, 65, 88, 93, 152, 230, 260 oral tradition, the 1–4, 14, 17, 20, 26, 27, 30n. 2, 31n. 15, 38, 40–5 passim, 52, 53, 55, 70n. 35, 86–90 passim, 105n.

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61, 123, 133, 142, 147, 166, 203, 255, 261 realist tradition 3 Russian and Slavic traditions 18 Western tradition 86, 117, 146, 228, 236 written tradition 148, 156, 166, 200, 216, 231, 237, 255 see also storytelling tradition transformation see metamorphosis Tredell, Nicolas 250n. 3, 251n. 21 Trojans/ Troy 94, 99 Trousdale, Anne 174, 189n. 122 Trumpener Katie 51, 52, 71n. 69 Turner, Mark 63, 74n. 114 truth communal truth(s) 112, 198, 267 and fiction (or lies) 13, 22, 29, 66, 133, 144, 155, 162, 261 truth-tellers 272 Underwood, James Amery (ed.) 33n. 66 Utopia/n See also Eden 102n. 5, 113, 132 Utopia discourses 180 Vargas Llosa, Mario (1936– ) 6, 7, 109–40, 144, 182n. 11 El Hablador, habladores 11n. 7, 118, 123, 125–6, 129, 131, 136n. 1 The Storyteller (1988) 7, 95–6, 136n. 1, 144 Vickery, John B. 194, 218n. 13 Victorian Victorian era/ age 54, 57, 224 Victorian fiction 49, 52, 143 Victorian novel 51, 87 Victorian storyteller 52, 76n. 128, 224 (see also Ivan Kreilkamp) Virgil 22, 119 War First World War 45 Indo-Pakistani War 156 post-war fiction 54 post-war America 74n. 107, 192 Second World War 35, 38, 44 Trojan war 94 Warner, Marina 33n. 64, 234, 236, 237, 242, 243, 245, 252nn. 27, 37, 40, 253n. 49, 254n. 59, 272, 279n. 45

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Index Watt, Ian 260, 266, 278n. 14, 279n. 28 Waugh, Patricia 57, 61, 62, 73n. 91, 74nn. 108, 110 Webb, Caroline 253n. 46 Weltliteratur see world literature and Goethe West, Nathaniel (1903–1940) 53 Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) 53, 72n. 71 Wheeler, Pat (ed.) 251n. 14, 254n. 63 White, Hayden 184n. 36 Wilson, Edmund 78, 94, 96, 105n. 46 Wilson, Epiphanius 30n. 3 Wilson, Leigh (Ed.) 75n. 123

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951) 68, 76n. 137 Wolpert, Stanley 156, 184n. 40 A New History of India (1977) 156 Woolf, Virginia (1882–1941) 249 writing/writers Continental European writing 86, 104n. 31 South-American writing 86 writer see also novelist Zamora, Lois Parkinson 134, 140n. 49 Zeitgeist 45 Ziegler, Heide 215, 221n. 72 Zipes, Jack 23, 24, 33n. 61, 252n. 45

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