2001 Humanities Lecture: "Storied Lives"
by Betsy Hearne
Abstract
Stories tell us who we are. The levels of narrative in our lives range from family anecdote to fairy tale, from worklore to technological mythology. Not only do our personal and social identities grow out of the stories we absorb, but our cultural survival depends on the stories we choose to believe. In fact, survival is the moral of all folktales, whatever other lessons they suggest. Survival is what stories teach and what they do, traveling in oral, print, and electronic traditions via collectors such as the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century, Ruth Sawyer in the twentieth, and the de- and re-personalized medium of the internet today.
I am deeply grateful for the privilege of giving the Humanities Lecture, particularly because it signifies this university’s commitment to recognizing children as humans–and children’s literature as an important dimension of all literature. My thanks especially to Leigh Estabrook, resigning Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science and champion of literature and library services for youth; to my supportive colleagues at GSLIS and the Center for Children’s Books; to our challenging graduate students; to children’s literature specialists across the campus; and to professional experts in the community’s school and public libraries who contribute so much to our work on campus and to the lives of our children.
To represent the humanities in a world where aesthetics are economically disadvantaged and politically marginalized requires a tenacious understanding of what it means to be human. The humanities are not an option, but a necessity for survival. We have a symbiotic relationship: the humanities express humanity, while humanity requires expression. I doubt that very many days go by without each of us experiencing some form of music, art, literature, philosophical thought, or historical perspective.
My particular interest is in the expression called storytelling, an activity that begins in utero and extends beyond death into the memory of those affected by our briefly flickering, fragile lives. Stories, which seem so ephemeral, often last longer than physical realities. As one of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s characters says, "Today we live, but by tomorrow today will be a story. The whole world, all human life, is one long story."
Ours is a narrative species. In a concentration camp, the starving inmates stuff bits and pieces of their story into stone walls. In a sunken Russian submarine, the dying sailor uses his last breath to write what is happening. The true dimensions of the events we have mourned since September 11 emerge in stories of life, death, and response. As listeners we build complete stories out of fragments, for stories are what is heard, interpreted, and imagined, as well as what is told, and every story is a collaboration of teller and listener or reader. Phone messages from the doomed become capsules of a life imagined by us, or retold by the caller’s loved ones in person, in print, and in electronic media.
Beyond such tragedies the pathway to recovery often lies through stories of humor or chance or apparent diversion that allow metaphorical encounter and restoration.
In 1945, Jean Cocteau shocked a French population devastated by World War II with his filming of "Beauty and the Beast," a fairy tale that seemed of slight importance compared to the harsh realities of survival. Yet Cocteau was dealing with survival–even revival–of the spirit. He saw his work as archeology of the soul, as resurrection and redemption of the human spirit from the ruins of war. In that same period, a German Jewish survivor named Jella Lepman founded the International Youth Library amidst the ruins of Munich–and later the International Board on Books for Young People–because she believed that the real hope for peace lay in crossing boundaries with books instead of bombs, in children’s understanding their common humanity through reading stories about one another. Today, the stories emerging from our recent devastation have already drawn us closer across many boundaries.
We are all walking stories, if not talking stories.
While not all of us translate our lives into published narrative, we are the richer for following our story tracks with narrative awareness. We need that awareness in academic research to gain any depth of integrative knowledge. Stories give meaning to statistics and are even the goal of statistics. Stories integrate the quantitative and the qualitative. Stories integrate the child in every adult and the adult in every child. Stories braid creativity and scholarship. On the one hand they are creative entertainment. On the other, they serve as storage for an infinite variety of formal and informal knowledge that can be analyzed as literary criticism, history, education, psychology, philosophy, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, gender theory, folklore, visual narrative, and other disciplines. What generates analysis, however, what makes story work, is aesthetic effect.
The art of the story is the heart of the story. We are captured by suspense, selection of detail, shape, image, tonal intensity, energy, rhythm, and language. Good storytellers play with these elements in some dynamic balance of the traditional and the innovative, the conventional and the original. Depending on the aesthetic power of a story and its telling, listeners’ or readers’ responses can be physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, or a combination thereof. Knowledge is interactive and never truly abstract. We cannot separate information from its text and context, its delivery and reception, which is why Library and Information Science incorporates the humanities and social sciences as well as science and technology. Information is only the beginning of knowledge; and knowledge, of wisdom. Information management is a possibility; knowledge management is like herding cats. And no one has the hubris to propose wisdom management. Stories, however, do manage to contain the most paradoxical elements of wisdom, along with a lot of knowledge and information.
Our stories begin in childhood and fall into lifelong narrative patterns. From the first experience of our mother’s heartbeat and voice, narrative both patterns chaos and prepares us for chaos. After we are born, nursery rhymes, finger games, and lullabies do the same. Some familiar examples: "This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home, this little piggy had roast beef, this little piggy had none, and this little piggy said wee wee wee wee wee all the way home." If that’s not a presaging of what life is going to be like, I don’t know what is.
"Rockabye baby in the treetops, when the bow bends the cradle will rock, when the bow breaks the cradle will fall, down will come baby cradle and all." Another little lesson in life’s unexpected ups and downs–remember where you heard it first. Or how about: "Tom, Tom the piper’s son, stole a pig and away he run. The pig was eat and Tom was beat and Tom ran crying down the street." This is crime and punishment in a nutshell–be forewarned.
Folklorists have categorized many of our narrative patterns into numbered motifs and tale types, but we find them in fiction as well. Since the oral and written traditions are both generated by the human condition, they naturally share patterns. Walter Ong asserts that oral and literary traditions have created two different, historically sequential modes of thinking, but I strongly believe the oral, written, and now electronic traditions co-exist. It’s not that one grows out of the other, but that they spring from the same source and intertwine. Thus we find common patterns in folklore, novels, family stories, web sites, and other narrative modes. In all of these genres, for instance, a hero, male or female, commonly makes a journey, outer or inner, undergoes tests, physical or spiritual, and returns changed by the experience. Within that pattern are myriad variants that reflect our individual journeys of survival, starting with that epic passage from the womb through the cervical stricture to open air. Odysseus’s adventures pale by comparison.
Tonight, I want to tell you something of my own story–how I became enthralled by literature and marveled at the ways in which it can help guide us through the confusion and fears and dreams of childhood–how the magic of "once upon a time" slowly, sometimes painfully, helped to shape a professional life that is endlessly challenging, endlessly satisfying–and how we have come to understand, often reluctantly, that stories connect us to each other and to our innermost selves.
And, perhaps what is most important, I want to tell you the story of how a small group of women have cajoled, insinuated, sometimes forced, our society to consider, and now embrace, children’s literature and its resplendent traditions. I’ve chosen to concentrate on two of these women–Ruth Sawyer, a storyteller and writer, and Margaret McElderry, a librarian and editor–because their lives, their grit, are so inspirational. They are both remarkable figures who have been part of a literary renaissance flowering in new ways today. They would see that one of the most exciting things about children’s literature at this University is the way in which the eternal need to narrate, to talk, to grope toward understanding, is part of an effort, a quest, if you will, that utilizes and integrates the story, humanity’s most basic tool, with a new technology that has revolutionized our daily lives.
Note that my idea of story ranges from daily worklore to party anecdotes to the Three Little pigs to Proust and Chretien de Troyes. It is wide and it encompasses all human activity. We each tell endless stories, some of us much more powerfully and gracefully than others. But each of us has a narrative that involves ourselves, our families, our communities, the world. Each of our stories has its counterpart in each of the world’s cities, villages, wastelands. There is no escape from the story. That’s why we study it, try to understand how and why one version works better than another, and what it does for us.
My favorite childhood fairy tale was "East of the Sun and West of the Moon." There were many reasons for this, primarily a parallel between the heroine’s life and what I felt, at the time unconsciously, to be my own. In the story, a girl cast out from her family on an arduous journey survives through sheer perseverance–not talent, not beauty, but the will to continue, enough faith in the journey to continue the journey, one foot after another. It was not until after I finished my dissertation on "Beauty and the Beast," turned it into a book, and edited an anthology of folktale variants that I realized I was still working on my favorite childhood fairy tale, even as an adult. "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" is a Scandinavian folk variant of "Beauty and the Beast." Somehow this tale showed me as a child how to survive, and survival, I believe, is the moral of all folktales, whatever other lessons they suggest. The folktale heroine of "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" succeeds through endurance; the literary heroine of "Beauty and the Beast," through perception. If we listen, the stories we hear and tell, tell us who we are. Applied to children in their developmental stages, this is a life-shaping concept. Put another way, the stories we are told, tell us who to be.
Over the decades that I’ve taught children’s literature and storytelling, I have read hundreds of "story diaries"–an exercise my students do to record the stories they hear in family, work, online, or media settings–and I’ve seen even more "story profiles" emerge as students select and tell tales that tell both them and me who they are. One student, for instance, finished the semester and realized that all her stories had been about food, which led her to some new self-understanding. Another discovered that most of the stories told about him in the family were trickster tales. In a storytelling class, I once illustrated family narrative with the example of my father, who during World War II insisted on absolute silence while he sat close to our radio listening to the news of men killed in battle. Once I ran into the house calling for him. He raised his head and shouted for me to be quiet. Crushed, I slunk into the kitchen where my mother was chopping vegetables for dinner. She knew, with one look, what had happened. "Did I ever tell you about your great-grandmother chopping vegetables?" she asked. "There she was, older than you but not much bigger, chopping carrots on the cutting board, chop, chop, chop, when she absentmindedly chopped open her hand instead of a carrot. She grabbed a clean dishtowel to staunch the bleeding. She got a needle and thread from her sewing basket. She dropped them in boiling water, and then she sewed up her left hand with her right hand." Thus my mother handed me a different kind of hero tale than those to which my father listened on the radio.
As I related this story and others like it to my students, I realized they were looking at me in a way they never had. Much later, I realized I had found my own folklore, family stories of determined women. What I recognized next, after seeing the pattern of these family narratives, was the deep connection with that folktale I’ve already mentioned, "East of the Sun and West of the Moon." After all, the heroine never gave up; in some versions she wears out 7 pairs of iron shoes walking around the world. It cannot be an accident that fifty-five years later I wrote a children’s book called Seven Brave Women, nor that the accolade I have treasured most is having it win a children’s book award named after Jane Addams.
This awareness of brave and often unsung women led me to do research on how important and yet how invisible has been women’s creation of the children’s literature we know today, which owes much to traditional folklore and has in turn proved a vehicle for the survival of traditional lore. Historically, most public storytelling traditions were dominated by men, from Greek epic singers to Celtic bards to East European Hassidic rebs or professional Middle Eastern storytellers. Women’s storytelling remained largely in the private domain. There are exceptions, of course, but a trend of gender division is clear. Most child-rearing, including much informal transfer of lore in the form of nursery rhymes, finger play, lullabies, and stories, has historically been done by women, especially in children’s earliest years. Folktales were often called "old wives’ tales" or "granny tales," and women were key informants for male-authored folklore collections that dominated early children’s literature: Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passe (1697), the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812-1815), and—when children were increasingly targeted as the primary folktale audience—Andrew Lang’s multicolor series (starting with The Blue Fairy Book, 1889). Their female informants were, in terms of recognition or reference, invisible. One could say that women had the unsung role of midwiving a significant amount of children’s folklore from an oral to a print tradition, from private to public settings, from informal to formal venues. But their "delivery" of stories was primarily done behind the scenes. The formal realm of publishing and scholarship related to those stories was mostly men’s. Women such as Madame Le Prince de Beaumont and Madame D’Aulnoy never achieved quite the classic status of male contemporaries such as Perrault.
When the twentieth century saw women themselves moving from the private to the public sphere, their behind-the-scenes role in perpetuating folklore as children’s literature continued, with positions slightly shifted to fit the print tradition. A collaboration of editors/publishers and librarians/storytellers midwived the entire industry of children’s literature—a corner allowed them by a male-dominated publishing trade. These women drew heavily on folklore as a cornerstone of children’s books in the form of both illustrated folktales and folkloric motifs in original picture books and fiction. Just as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women had "delivered" folklore to the world through the medium of collectors and scholars, so twentieth-century women delivered folklore to the world through the medium of authors and illustrators. This time the women functioned not as informants but (a) as editors selecting manuscripts, matching texts with illustrations, and balancing aesthetic and commercial success; and/or (b) as librarians selecting books and reading or telling book-based stories to children. In both cases, their work remained obscure if not anonymous. (Note that the two awards that carry the most critical prestige and economic importance in U.S. children’s literature, established in 1922 and 1938, were named after men: John Newbery and Randolph Caldecott.)
The story of one woman, Ruth Sawyer, is a typical example of overlooked twentieth-century visionaries who nurtured storytelling and children’s literature. Ruth Sawyer was born in 1880 of an affluent family whose fortunes were reversed when her father died. She did receive an education at a female seminary in New York, however, and at the Garland Kindergarten Training School, which prepared her to earn an independent income as a teacher. Her state of independence was more than financial. We know from her autobiographical children’s novel, Roller Skates, which won the Newbery Award in 1937, that she was a rebellious child who never fit into the family’s conventional expectations. At the age of twenty, when many young women were settling into marriage, Sawyer went to Cuba to teach storytelling to teachers organizing kindergartens for children orphaned during the Spanish-American War two years earlier. Afterward, she returned to study folklore and storytelling at Columbia University, where she finished her BS in 1904. During two summers in 1905 and 1907, she worked in Ireland for the New York Sun and spent time in the countryside collecting Irish folk tales.
Sawyer’s background for this work was rooted in childhood. Her beloved Irish nanny Johanna was a constant and consummate storyteller who steeped young Ruth in the importance of stories to children’s development and, indeed, to all stages of life. One tale in particular symbolizes this conviction. "The Peddler of Ballaghaderreen" was a story that Sawyer collected from John Hegarty, a seanachie from County Donegal. It’s about a peddler whose habit of giving away his wares, along with his stories, to poor children has rendered him destitute. In the little village of Ballaghaderreen where he lives beside a crossroads, he has even allowed the blackbirds to pluck fruit from his cherry tree and the rabbits to nibble at his garden. Desperate with hunger, he dreams three nights in a row that St. Patrick tells him to go stand on the bridge over the river Liffey in far-away Dublin and listen carefully. When he finally manages to get there, he hears nothing significant until finally a rich innkeeper tells him about a ridiculous dream that he himself has had in which St. Patrick appears with orders to go to a little village called Ballaghaderreen and dig under a cherry tree near the crossroads. The peddler hurries home and finds a treasure in his own backyard, which he shares with neighbors and weary travelers. After he dies, these beneficiaries spend the gold he has given away, but they keep his story forever. Clearly, we must journey away to understand where we’ve come from. And clearly, stories last longer than gold.
This was a favorite tale of Ruth Sawyer’s, with variants in many cultures, and it was one that she told to myriad children during her long career of storytelling in libraries, schools, and the federal reformatory system for women. It affected not only young people, many of whom were immigrants, refugees, and other marginalized ethnic groups, but also the adult professionals who listened or learned the tale from Sawyer’s book The Way of the Storyteller, a text influential in library schools for half a century. These listeners and readers then retold the story themselves in libraries across the country.
Thanks to librarians who kept meticulous records of their story sessions, we have rich evidence of how broadly and deeply such stories affected children. A doctoral student here at GSLIS, Melanie Kimball, unearthed the following two examples in the archives of the St. Louis Public Library. On August 6, 1912, the librarian told the Greek myth of "Perseus" to fifty children at De Soto Playground and also to fifty more at Yeatman Square. "Theseus and Perseus," she writes, "have been the most popular stories I have told with big and little." On February 19, 1913, she writes: "Told ‘Theseus,’ ‘Why Brother Bear Has No Tail,’ ‘The Peterkins and the Piper’ to two groups (120) of almost grown boys and girls at Franklin Night School. Theseus was a ‘howling’ success. It took 45 minutes to tell it and still they were not tired and wanted more." The children’s hunger for these classics is clear. Bear in mind that most librarians had storytelling sessions for various age groups in various venues several times a week, not to mention their daily recommendations of books to both children and caretakers, and then consider the impact their choices had in acculturating children.
For just as we shape our stories, our stories shape us. I believe that "The Peddler of Ballaghederreen" was chosen and remained popular because it metaphorically reflected the spirit of the entire professional network that fostered children’s literature. Of course, depending on cultural context, St. Patrick can be Elijah or an angel or simply a magical stranger—a muse, if you will, or an alter ego, or simply the subconscious—but it’s clear how much Ruth Sawyer’s life fits the pattern of this folktale, which folklorists classify as Tale Type 1645, Motif N531.1. You have already heard how she traveled with her pack of stories during the early stages of her career. What’s even more unusual for a woman of her times, however, is that after she married and had children, she continued to follow her dream of collecting, telling, and writing stories. In 1931, at the age of 51, she spent a year away from her family and traveled through a Spanish countryside that was torn by factions of the upcoming Civil War. There she collected folktales to bring home and spread among U.S. children. In 1961, at the age of 81, she spent time in Austria researching tales of the Dwarf-King Laurin. Meanwhile, she became one of the most important writers of children’s books in her era, producing not only a Newbery Award winner but also two Caldecott Honor Books. One of these, Journey Cake, Ho! (1954), was adapted from an Appalachian folktale and illustrated by her son-in-law, Robert McCloskey, the artist famous for another Caldecott Award book, Make Way for Ducklings. He was married to Ruth Sawyer’s daughter Margaret Durand, a children’s librarian. In Sawyer’s personal life, as in her professional life, she was part of a deeply collaborative network.
This collaborative network is perhaps best profiled by a woman who has been working at the cross-roads of librarians, storytellers, writers, and editors for nearly a century. Born in 1912 of Irish-American parents, Margaret K. McElderry was trained at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library School with some of the early pioneers of children’s literature and storytelling. She began her professional career in 1936 as assistant to the woman who had directed children’s services at the New York Public Library since 1906, Anne Carroll Moore, and worked with Moore’s successor Frances Clarke Sayers and storyteller Mary Gould Davis before taking a job as children’s book editor at Harcourt Brace in 1945. During the subsequent 56 years she has become one of the most influential and widely respected figures in children’s literature. At 89 years of age, McElderry still goes into her office every day at Simon and Schuster to work with award-winning authors such as Susan Cooper and Margaret Mahy.
Margaret McElderry’s lifetime of commitment, courage, and broad collaboration is reflected in the stories that she has published and, to an extent, the stories about how those works came into being. Listing her writers and illustrators awards suggests the elegance of her standards, but does not begin to reveal the human dimension. Perhaps the only way to convey her epic journey is by telling a story that epitomizes each step:
To begin, all children’s literature specialists recognize childhood as the crucible of humanity. An essential part of their work involves exploring and evaluating their own childhood experiences. Here is young Margaret. She stands over her mother who, busy in her garden, is spading up worms and stories intermittently. Margaret detests worms, but she will not leave the garden. "Go on, go on," she pleads, "what happens next?" That is the question she still asks today as she makes her way through a manuscript and the decisions involved in transforming it into a book.
Enter Margaret working at her first job, trying desperately to satisfy the serious expectations of Anne Carroll Moore for a professional staff. Margaret is the first to be allowed to wear short sleeves in the summer, though they still come right down to the elbow. Without realizing it, she has met the man she will marry decades later when he is head of W. W. Norton and she is famous for editing books that win both the Newbery and Caldecott Awards in the same year (1952). His mother knew Ruth Sawyer’s mother and was a distant relative of Anne Carroll Moore’s. Storer Lunt greets Margaret McElderry formally whenever he passes her desk on his way to the inner sanctum of Moore’s office: "Good afternoon, Miss McElderry." Young Miss McElderry sometimes works till midnight to meet Anne Carroll Moore’s high standards, but at the moment she is balancing a jelly bean on the tips of her fingers and hitting the heel of her hand in an attempt to make the jelly bean fly neatly into her mouth. She has been cultivating this trick ever since watching Moore’s other assistant secretly carry it off with aplomb. Finally, it works, but the fateful jelly bean goes down the wrong tube. Even as she chokes, Margaret is terrified not of dying but of Miss Moore’s discovery of her gagging to death in the corner. There is an ongoing tension between children’s literature specialists taking their work seriously in face of a world that often does not, and the work itself requiring a sense of humor, mischief, and subversion.
More than a decade later, Margaret is more professionally seasoned but still brand new to the publishing world. Yet she has just rejected two children’s book manuscripts by Carl Sandburg, who storms into her office and gives her a nasty tongue-lashing. Immediately, she offers her resignation to Mr. Harcourt, who turns it down. The stories are never published, because unlike Sandburg’s earlier children’s stories they are not very good, and Margaret has asserted the critical standards she absorbed at Carnegie Library School and the New York Public Library. Despite the fact that children’s book publishing increasingly reflects the commercialism of adults’, it remains clear to children’s literature specialists that their young readers and listeners don’t give a rip about a big-name author who gets outlandish advances for mediocre books. These young readers and listeners will show their disdain by dropping the book accidentally into a mud puddle, leaving a classroom to go to the bathroom during reading sessions, or punching a neighbor, or flying paper-airplane notes across the room, and other rebellious activities. On the other hand, unknown new writers and illustrators who show an ability to hold that restless audience—while at the same time satisfying critical standards—can still get published and win awards.
A maturing Margaret discovers many of her best new authors through library networking. An Italian-American storyteller whom she befriends at the New York Public Library introduces her husband, a writer named Will Lipkind, to Margaret, who then publishes his picture book manuscript Finders Keepers, illustrated by a Russian immigrant named Nicolas Mordvinoff. It wins the Caldecott Award. Before this success, however, Mordvinoff’s earlier picture book about a boy and a cat, entitled The Two Reds, has been boycotted by FAO Schwartz for being Communistic. This does not deter Margaret from publishing another book with Mordvinoff, and she gets heavy support from the network: first from the librarians who recognize the book’s worth, buy it, and award Mordvinoff’s next book the Caldecott; and second, from the fellow editors–all but one are women–who gather for lunch at the Children’s Book Council every month and talk over their publications. Although competitive, these women bond and rally behind each other like an encircled wagon train.
But Margaret has many kinds of standards. Now she stands in the bathroom of the Harcourt hotel suite at the ALA conference where Mordvinoff will be awarded the 1952 Caldecott. One of her other authors, Eleanor Estes, a former librarian who wrote the immensely popular series about a family called the Moffats, will receive the Newbery Award at this same conference. In the middle of the bathroom floor, which affords the only privacy available in a publishing suite crowded with people, Mordvinoff is on his knees in front of Margaret begging her to forgive him. He did not appear at a party in honor of Estes, and Margaret has told him that she doesn’t care if he did win the Caldecott, there is no excuse for rudeness.
That same year, 1952, she publishes Margot Benary-Isbert’s novel The Ark, the first postwar U.S. children’s book translated from German and revealing the destruction McElderry had witnessed on the European front during her World War II work for the Office of War Information in London and Brussels. Unlike The Two Reds, whose ridiculously hostile reception took her by surprise, she knows that this novel is risky business—though not as risky as the collection of Japanese folktales by Yoshiko Uchida that she published in 1949, along with that author’s subsequent novels about her family’s experience in U.S. detention camps for Japanese-American citizens during the war. After all, an editor’s books have to make money, and the American public’s view of children’s books is politically and morally conservative. But somehow Margaret’s international networking and global vision of children’s literature beyond borders anchor these risky books on her list and in children’s libraries. In 1995 at the age of 83, Margaret meets with Japanese Empress Michiko at the royal palace, where, by the way, one topic of conversation is Elizabeth Gray Vining, a brilliant children’s fiction writer and Newbery Award winner who tutored the empress’s husband. In addition to McElderry’s many years of networking with Japanese children’s librarians, she has published the empress’s English translation of renowned poet Michio Mado’s verse with illustrations by Mitsumasa Anno, winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Illustrator Award. Two years later, Michio Mado wins the Hans Christian Andersen Writer Award. And so it goes: high risks, high ideals, high adventures, high honors, high hopes, high humor.
Now it is the year 2001. As part of an ongoing oral history project I have been following Margaret McElderry around for years with ears tuned and pen and paper or tape recorder ready. She stands in her New York kitchen by the phone ordering her weekly groceries, including, as always, "half a dozen large brown eggs." After hanging up, she turns with a contagious grin and recalls that after a recent speech she was asked to describe the writer Lucy Boston, whose books about The Children of Green Knowe Margaret published and in whose centuries-old English house Margaret was married late in life. "Suddenly," says Margaret, "as I remembered Lucy’s lovely large brown eyes, I heard myself saying that ‘Lucy had the loveliest large brown eggs.’ I could hardly go on for laughing." And Margaret nearly doubles over with laughter. It is a slip of the tongue, but there’s something germinal about this association of eyes and eggs. It is certainly indicative of the family relationship Margaret has always had with her authors, illustrators, fellow editors and librarians who mutually sustained one another during the historical transition from telling stories in a domestic setting to telling stories in a professional setting. Eyes and eggs. They all perceived, on the one hand, the great calling of Story and, on the other, gathered and consumed it as their daily fare.
These were the kind of women who created the twentieth-century world of children’s literature; who established the publishing imprints that gave us books like Where the Wild Things Are and Charlotte’s Web; who bought the books for libraries, which represented 85% of children’s book sales; who read and recommended to children the best literature; who reviewed and awarded books, and–full circle–encouraged editors to continue publishing. Where would our children be without stories like Charlotte’s Web to guide them through the journeys of life, death, and friendship? In books for children, the classic survives within the contemporary. Even children’s films and video games thrive on mythology. The games of the gods are infinitely adaptable. Their latter-day playing fields have ranged across comics, radio, television, and the internet. In fact, much of the storytelling children experience today is electronic, whether it’s in the form of email, chat rooms, web sites, computer games, or CD Roms. How will this affect bookmaking and the oral tradition as vehicles of storytelling? Are there common patterns between the way stories reconstituted themselves in oral and print traditions–via collectors such as the Brothers Grimm in the 19th century and Ruth Sawyer in the 20th–and the de- and re-personalized medium of the internet today? Are there gender implications, since many studies have shown that men dominate areas of computer technology that may prove a primary medium for the children’s literature and storytelling that has been primarily a women’s realm?
As far as children’s literature goes, we don’t know yet. For the moment we do not have computers that will withstand hard teething and copious drool the way a board book can. Electronic publishing is still too young to have caught up with the sophisticated flexibility of printed books for children, and the few attempts at electronic children’s books have not succeeded, so we have no basis for analysis. However, we do have evidence of much informal electronic storytelling, which will pioneer the way toward more formal modes of electronic story for both children and adults. Perhaps a parallel exists in art: what began as capability for electronic reproduction and storage of images already becomes a new medium for original creation. But as in all new ventures, we start with questions. How will computers capture the aesthetic elements that we have acknowledged as the carrying power of story? Does the world wide web function more as a museum—a big mouthy archive—or as a live medium for storytelling? As an archive, the electronic environment both presents and solves problems of access and preservation. As a live medium, it must provide devices to translate (or reflect or replace) the facial expression, body language, tonal inflection, and variation of pace that traditionally transform words into oral story. How does it pick up the nuances of audience response that make a teller spontaneously shape and reshape a story? How does 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 and, eventually, on the creation of story and literature itself.
I see my Masters class in storytelling as a kind of capstone course of life. 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 experience 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 text chat 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. Those who do not think quickly "on their feet" may stay quiet in text chat but shine in web board postings, where they can cut and paste long, thoughtful asynchronous messages similar to letter writing and hospitable to storytelling. 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 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 text chat audience discussing a story they’ve just heard on live audio, relayed with different lag times for all the students, must sort out many non-sequiturs as several students type simultaneous responses that appear sequential in scrolling down the screen 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.
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 gossip, or 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 email 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 many years ago 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. Is a heroine who frees herself from a witch who lives in a house on chicken legs and flies through the air with a mortar and pestle really going to have problems with virtual reality? Surely Baba Yaga and her intended victims will survive on the World Wide Web. Not to mention Harry Potter and Co.
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? Of course 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. 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 electronic transmission.
And of course the oral tradition does survive and thrive today among both children and adults. Every new generation of children literally belongs to the oral tradition before they learn to read. The stories we tell and read to them are their cultural and emotional history. 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. What we have to offer are the heroes and tricksters and helpers and witches and ogres who show them the way we’ve survived—or not survived—before.
I began this talk with reference to story as a form of survival. Survival is what stories teach us and what they do. As we get older, material things mean less to us than the stories that go with them. This is a gold chain given to me by my best friend in junior high and high school. Her young mother had died of breast cancer, and my friend, to honor our lifesaving relationship, gave me first choice of her mother’s jewelry. I chose this chain for the gold–like the friends of the Peddler of Ballaghaderreen–but long after my friend herself died young of breast cancer, I treasure it for the story of our friendship. Even if I lose the chain or give it away, I still have what’s really valuable. Stories can acquire new dimensions even after death. At the end of my mother’s 92 years, as material and physical life ebbed, she had nothing left except stories, but those stories did not end with her life. In celebrating the achievements of "ordinary women" in history, I wrote some of her stories down, in the voice of her grandchild.
[Read page from Seven Brave Women.]
Although she had planned to become an architect, my mother’s doctoral advisor insisted that she go into architectural history instead, because women were not accepted as architects in the 1920s. Since then, however, one of the male students who took the university courses she taught in architectural history and historical preservation during the 1960s has nominated her for posthumous awards in two organizations that in the old days did not admit women. She won them both. So, life keeps telling us new stories as well as old ones. If you listen, you’ll discover that you, too, are living a storied life. And now congratulations to all of us for having survived a very long lecture. Next time I’ll tell the story of Theseus.
—Presented at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science on Thursday, September 20, 2001.
The Humanities Lectureship was established by the Humanities Council of the University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 1977 to recognize and honor a faculty member in the humanities for outstanding achievement, and to provide an opportunity for colleagues and students to hear a member of their own scholarly community deliver an address reflecting their writing and scholarship.