Once There Was and Will Be: Storytelling the Future
by Betsy Hearne
In a tiny Irish village by the sea live two nonagenarians who run the pub that's been in their family for well over a century. They tell me the story of their mother's sister, a midwife who delivered both of them as well as their five brothers and sisters and all the other babies in the area. She was crippled from birth, trained in Dublin, and the only person who got along with the erratic local doctor. It's a moving story. Yet after it is told, it is gone. The spell cast by these particular tellers and listeners, this particular place and time, is dispelled. The story will never come again the same way, even if someone happens by that small pub in that small village, someone inside or outside the community who is interested enough to ask and to listen during the days remaining to these extraordinary old women. Whether some listener remembers and retells the story determines if (and how) it survives. Generally speaking, chances are slim. Oral tradition has forgotten many more stories than it remembers.
At the end of an unpaved road leading from another Irish village nearby there lives a Dutch nonagenarian, retired from the Netherlands to County Cork. He sits in front of a computer overlooking the sea. His days are numbered by a serious heart condition, but he spends them enthusiastically gathering stories about his Friesian family, which he has traced back 7 centuries via internet and email connections. Soon there will be a reunion of relatives from all over the world, and he will be the chief storyteller, a gift he exercises, meanwhile, with whoever passes by. But his stories will survive him, assembled in that great anthology in the sky, the World Wide Web.
Does his computer by the sea change storytelling, as print affected the oral tradition? Does his computer by the sea represent a defining difference between the past and future of storytelling? If so, does it function more as a museum—a big mouthy archive—or as a live medium for oral storytelling? As a live medium, it must provide devices to translate (or reflect or replace) the spontaneously varied facial expressions, body language, tonal inflection, and variation of pace that traditionally transform words into oral story. Since the electronic future is a development of the very recent past, we don't yet know the impact it will have on the oral tradition. How will it pick up the nuances of audience response that make a teller shape and reshape a story? How will it generate the third dimension created by an exchange of physical energy between teller and listener(s), the texture of an occasion? What is the equivalent of eye contact online, of the literal touching of children who crowd close in real space? What is the difference between physical and virtual presence, physical and virtual community? Only time and experience will answer many of these questions, but thinking about the future of storytelling requires us to consider the impact of electronic media on oral tradition.
With oral tradition, a storytelling lived on in imagination and memory. With the coming of print tradition, a storytelling lived on in imagination and memory, but there was increasing potential for a written back-up exclusive to those who could read, access, and circulate the medium of storage. That medium has revolutionized human society, but it is limited, slow, and static compared to current electronic media that not only preserve stories but also capture some of the spontaneous combustion of the spoken word. The fact that an infinite net can now be cast over stories that at the same time seem elusively fluid makes the electronic era appear radically different. Storytelling seems bursting at the seams with innovations that can join tellers and listeners into an electrified global community that blurs the boundaries between tellers and listeners, allowing them to switch places more democratically than ever before. I suspect, however, that virtual appearances are deceiving and that a closer look tells a different story, which is this: the future of storytelling lies in the past. Despite constantly changing media, we keep rediscovering essentials of the oral tradition in variant forms.
Telling stories is a human condition with a history of human continuities. There's a reason, for instance, that so many stories begin with "One time" or "Once upon a time" or "Once there was and was not" or any one of many other opening formulas that give us distance from past time and place. If the events were not set in the past, we wouldn't know what happened. Not to mention the fact that we wouldn't have the necessary perspective on those events to shape a tale, to sculpt the events into a story. Even our most famous closing formula—"they lived happily ever after"—while projecting the future of the story's time, is in fact set in the listener's past. Beyond formulas, our basic story grammar usually depends on past tense verbs; if we switch into the present ("and then, he says to me . . ."), it is understood that we are bringing past events forward to make them seem more immediate. In an oral telling, these outbursts of present tense often slip in at escalating or climactic moments to heighten the drama of an event gone by. An entire story or novel presenting present events in the present tense would produce, speaking of tense, either unbearable tension or its total absence, ie., tedium. Most stories set in the future are of course told in past tense, as if they had already happened (they have, at least, already been imagined). When you hear actual future tense, you know it's not story but prophecy (or maybe a committee meeting). Storytelling is not meteorology. Forecasting the future of storytelling depends on patterns of the past, on what's already happened and been told. This does not mean, however, that new aspects of storytelling don't develop.
At the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science, I teach a masters degree course in storytelling. One section is on-campus and the other online. The first is a class that not only deals with oral traditions but also generates an oral community of its own through the traditional storytelling dynamics of physical presence. Faces flicker with humor or sadness; the room is hot or cold; someone passes around cookies or muffins; the hallway is noisy or quiet; energy waxes or wanes contagiously. The sharing of a mutual environment builds mutual experiences and reference points.
The second class features a different set of dynamics. Students from as far away as Japan, Thailand, Colombia, Alaska, and the Virgin Islands depend on live audio transmission and synchronous textchat (the equivalent of an Internet chat room) to tell stories as well as to study them. Our present state of technology denies us the power of eye contact, which is proverbially crucial to storytelling. On the other hand, some students who find visibility intimidating become more expressive when they cannot see or be seen by others. And long-distance education students seem increasingly inventive about using format, typeface, symbols, sound, graphics, and verbal adjustments to indicate pace, pause, tone, mood, physical response, and emotional reactions. Some signals are already standardized. Words in capital letters represent shouting. Asterisks before and after a word suggest emphasis. A colon followed by a hyphen and a closed-parens makes a sideways smiling face indicating a joke; substitute a semi-colon for the colon and you get a winking face. LOL means laughing out loud. Verbally, audience reaction is layered. A textchat audience dicussing a story they've just heard on live audio must sort out many non sequiturs as several students type simultaneous reponses that appear sequential but may not refer to the remarks immediately preceding them. At best, threads of thought interweave; at worst, they unravel. Always they require adjustment, since the equivalent in a physical environment would be the whole class talking at once. These are only tiny adaptations common in the online class.
I have also taught a doctoral seminar on folklore called "From Fireplace to Cyberspace," which became the title of a collaborative conference that in turn became a book on various aspects of story; the same course generated a set of articles that became the issue of a scholarly journal. This process of transformation from one medium to another involved shifting permutations of storytelling, teaching, discussion, and writing. It was challenging, for instance, to convey in a printed conference-proceeding the effects of a storytelling that took place between the delivery of two academic papers, which were both telling stories in their own way. Now, of course, whole conferences take place online, adding another dimension entirely. Will the Jonesborough Storytelling Festival jump onto the net? Before proclaiming a definitive "no," remember that survivors adapt in order to continue. Oral storytelling did not die out with print, radio, or television. It changed, adapted, interacted.
My students are perceptive about the impact of incorporating one medium into another, about the blurring of boundaries between private and public; between legend, rumor, and reality; between access and exposure; between connection and isolation; between claims on story ownership. One student says that stories traveling on the internet represent a kind of geographic tracking compressed in time. Another says that the internet is like a friend of a friend who has your address and can forward tales to you without any intermediary. Another says that unknown sources spreading stories on the internet are like someone shouting fire in a crowded room without getting caught. Another points out the superstitions that thrive on scientific technology: If you pass on this message, says an e-mail correspondent, you will have good luck; if you don't, beware of misfortune. Students talk about "webisodes" and techniques to heighten suspense or emphasize punch lines through the manipulation of spacing, which becomes a literal translation of time into space. These are the storytellers of the future. While they are talking, I am thinking back to Max Lüthi, who theorized that the folktale hero is disconnected in time and place and therefore connected universally. It is clear that the folktale hero will feel at home venturing into a virtual world.
The study of storytelling adapts to changing times much as stories do themselves. One good example is the attitude of folklorists toward those who tell them stories. There are three basic steps to exploring storytelling in a specific context, steps that have long been systematized by folklorists. The first step is collection; the second is archiving; the third is analysis. Influencing the nature of this process are attitudes of the processors. Early on, for instance—and this directly relates to the first step of the process—anthropologists collected stories as if they were waving butterfly nets to catch exotic specimens. This not only humiliated their subjects but also subjected the collectors to their victims' frequently humorous methods of escape, including giving the collectors stories that told nothing about the cultural context that was getting raided, or stories that led the collectors chasing in the opposite direction of any true insight. Insiders threatened by outsiders can get very tricky.
A newer approach is to swap story cultures tale for tale. I give to you, you give to me. This also serves to stimulate a narrator who, if confronted with a direct question regarding stories he or she remembers, could draw a complete blank. Lost of times a story will begin, "That reminds me . . ." The newer attitude involves finding common ground through a project that both collector and narrator are undertaking together, rather than dividing the ground between collector and narrator. It's also called priming the pump.
This kind of updating goes for interpretation as well, which one can hope is growing less rigidly bound by the grip of single-minded theories and also more inclusive of input from the storytellers rooted in a culture with which the collector may not be deeply familiar. Enter the Internet, where we are sometimes hearing voices inaudible to the selective print world, to academic bailiwicks, commercial media, or established storytelling networks, formal and informal. If we take advantage of this shifting balance of voices, we may get a new understanding of storytelling not as homogenized, but as localized. And of course the more humanity storytelling emcompasses, the more humanly messy it will seem. Storytelling is an art, not a science, and it's just possible that electronic reproduction could complicate its human dimensions rather than simplifying them. We used to have a saying down south, "Do tell!" It was a cross between "wow" and "you're kidding." In other words, it expressed both intrigued support and ironic skepticism unto disbelief; both a hint to stop now before you really go overboard and encouragement for you to continue. Stories are full of such ambivalent messages, which is why they are so much more telling than straightforward, directive forms of information. If you listen openmindedly, stories, jokes, and anecdotes will give you the real lowdown on functions and values in a group, including the mythology of its founding, the nature of its winners and losers, and its tricksters' advice on survival. Storytelling is an ongoing process, which, like Coyote and other shape-changers, undergoes a thousand deaths but never dies.
Tomorrow turns into yesterday with only a story's difference. The present eats up our future and digests it into the past so fast we cannot catch it by the tail—only by the tale. The futuristic electronic revolution through which we're now speeding has occasioned me, for instance, to "hear" more urban legends on the Internet than ever I did mouth-to-ear. Yet the story patterns have an old familiar ring, as do the techniques used to tell them and to make people believe them. We can hardly keep up with the changes in contemporary communications, but the stories simply jump ship from one medium to the next. Are there storytelling differences between fireplace and cyberspace? Sure there are. The details change, just as they have in folkloric tradition for centuries, but many of the elements endure, while the meaning depends on who's listening—just as it always has.
The most basic dynamic of folklore is a tension between tradition and innovation that keeps a story living orally (for a 456-page elaboration, see Barre Toelken's book The Dynamics of Folklore). The other great balancing act is the interaction between text and context. A Navajo coyote story told by an elder in a reservation hogan during the wintertime takes on completely different dimensions when told by a non-Native-American librarian to a multicultural audience in—God forbid—a summertime story hour. Certain stories are only supposed to be told in certain seasons, with disastrous consequences for violation; but once a tale enters the print/electronic tradition by way of anthologies, picture books, or web pages, that seasonal stipulation is usually lost (and we wonder why we have spells of bad luck.)
A Brer Rabbit story, perhaps told by one African-American slave to others during the mid-nineteenth century, changes in a storyteller's delivery to listeners attending an annual storytelling festival in Illinois or a university online storytelling clss. Yet certain aspects of each story stay the same, or the story is lost. That's the tension between tradition and innovation, text and context; that tension shapes the story's future. If the story has a powerful core, it may withstand the leap between cultures, media, and time periods. Then it will journey into the future on the back of one or another storyteller.
During my first year as a storyteller and children's librarian at the Wayne County Public Library, Wooster, Ohio, 1964, I told a story about Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox that commanded the attention of a hundred children in an unheated Carnegie library building attic. When I snarled like Brer Fox, the children snarled like Brer Fox. When I switched my finger to show how Brer Fox switched his tail, the children switched their finger-tails—without any interactive instructions, mind you. And when I got to the climax, where it looked like Brer Rabbit's goose was pretty nearly cooked, one little boy, who had been edging closer and closer as the story edged on, threw up all over my shoes. If that's not a tribute to the ongoing power of story, I don't know what is. Well, he could have had the flu, but I think he was feeling the tension between Brer Rabbit's vulnerability and Brer Rabbit's capability, winner take all. And the stakes were high. Brer Rabbit was, in fact, tied to a stake, with several possible deaths available among which he pleaded for the briar patch and won. Is this story the same then, now, and forever? Of course not. Will it survive the future? If the past serves as a barometer, the answer is yes. Virtual vomit may be coming up soon—orality has many expressions, and we should not underestimate the potential for their electronic manifestation. One of our biggest myths about technology, on the other hand, is that it can do anything, everything, and more. We attribute to it a life of its own not humanly emanated, and we anthropomorphize its power for good and evil. It is important to remember that human imagination is the source of both the oral tradition and its development via electronice transmission.
Every new generation of children belongs to the oral tradition, especially before they learn to read. The stories we tell them are their cultural and emotional history. (In Italian—as orally expressive a language as any—the word sentire means both "to hear" and "to feel.") Children want us to tell them where they came from, not where they're going, which, in any case, we have no way of knowing. The future they will forge for themselves, thank you very much. What we have to offer is the heroes and tricksters and helpers and witches and ogres who show them the way we've survived—or not survived—before. The future of storytelling is the past.
—The Horn Book Magazine, November/December 2000 (pp. 712-719). Used by permission.