Epic distance and the rupture in experience: Bakhtin, Benjamin and me!

For over a year I have been setting up internal ‘discussions’ between two of my main influences: Walter Benjamin (particularly his essay ‘The Storyteller’) and Mikhail Bakhtin (particularly his thoughts on ‘epic’ versus ‘novel’).  This morning I feel I can intervene in their dialogue and help sort out their differences.  WARNING: this is a long and detailed post, I am deep in my theoretical woods here, so if you're feeling like a short walk by the river, check out some of my other posts instead...

If, as Bakhtin rejoices, the novel is about polyphony – multiple social languages in wondrous, open-ended, unresolved dialogue  (‘life’s fullness’, as Benjamin grants) – the flipside of this, mourned by Benjamin, is that it is about the irredeemably perplexing and ultimately lonely nature of life.  The novel is about the individual’s search for the meaning of life, ultimately a hopeless search in which no-one can guide him to the answer.  He is lacking ‘counsel’ (Benjamin) – why? Because of the ruptures brought about by rapid social change, the information age, the isolation of each individual’s experience.  Think of the working class father whose experience as a builder seems to have no bearing on his son’s endless string of casual call centre jobs, silencing his reminiscences.  Or think of the online ‘fangirl’ community where young women create disturbing and sexually explicit fantasy stories in an environment untrodden by any guiding adult, with its own social norms utterly different from those of the mainstream.  So the novel celebrates the individual’s endurance of perplexity in polyphonic chaos – their strivings to make it up as they go along, and call this meaning.

If on the other hand, the story is about continuity and communicability of experience (Benjamin), the common underlying structures of life (Milan Kundera called this the sense of ‘es muss sein’, ‘it has to be’), it travels along archetypal paths which bind the teller and the listeners.  The flipside of this is Bakhtin's view that the story’s epic nature denies either any agency: the epic story is finished and unchallengeable. (I realise I am conflating his views on epic with his contrasting views on folktale, but I think I wouldn't mind me doing so for the purposes of dialogue.) He forgets perhaps that the storyteller has already travelled these paths in her own particular way, as will the listeners in their own.

Then my burning desire to tell stories is an urge to declare underlying commonality of experience – to sew up tears in the rupture.  I feel this is the case: I want to show my counsel to be relevant, ‘useful’ as Benjamin says. 

Yet both I and my listeners were brought up primarily on the novel, not the story.  So it could not be otherwise than that I would ‘novelise’ (Bakhtin) the stories I tell, giving them psychological interiority and inconclusiveness.  As Benjamin decrees and I like most storytellers feel to be right, I will do this very little in my first telling – I will leave in that ‘chaste compactness’ that allows the listeners to bind the story into their own experience – but this is very much what I and the young people will be about in subsequent workshop activities.  We could hardly do otherwise.  Thus Bakhtin describes the way the novel pulls all other forms to itself. 

But things have moved on.  Bakhtin might have envisaged the novel endlessly tearing up ‘epic distance’, knocking down gods, parodying archetypes.  He might not have foreseen how, once all the gods had been destroyed, humanity would feel the need to rediscover the paths of counsel – that in storytelling workshops, a group of young people might sometimes take refuge in the ‘es muss sein’ of epic distance, telling them how they might live their lives and define themselves.  At other times, of course, they would restore the multiplicity and perplexity that they know must on some level exist within the most perfectly formed story.  They would play with these opposing pulls like a tug of war.

So when Tom Maguire talks about the ‘return of the storytellers’ to the stage, or when youth theatre practitioners tell me that stories are right back at the heart of practice with young people, they are evidencing what Kearney, Ricoeur and countless others call the ‘narrative turn’.  It’s a swing of the pendulum back towards counsel and archetype, but because of where it started we have assimilated many skills of navigating perplexity and writing our own identities.  This time, we listen to the stories and consciously choose to use their archetypal paths to guide us and dignify our experience.  This is the dialogic mode of storytelling.  It is a mode which restores the necessary role of the storyteller, but foregrounds the listeners' active re-making of the story as never before.

However, it gives the storyteller new responsibilities and insecurities.  No longer can she work in the innocent community Benjamin yearned back towards, assuming her listeners' life experience will turn out to be similar to her own, and thus relying on the self-evident usefulness of her counsel.  Her ‘usefulness’ (in fact her right to tell at all) must now be earned, by making it evident that she is ready to put her counsel at the listeners’ free disposal, as well as receive counsel from their knowledge, gained in their different world.  (I wonder: was Benjamin aware of this different, more knowing spirit of storylistening?  Did he foresee the narrative turn even as he was mourning the passing of story?  Is this why he emphasises the ‘chaste compactness’ and the vital role of the gaps in the story?  Because this is indeed where these dialogic processes occur.)  This is the 'moment' of the storytelling revival; this is why storytelling is in some ways a different artform than the archaic forms it claims descendance from, and I am experiencing this in my encounters with adolescents.  I need to justify my choice of story, contract delicately with them as to the right opportunity for telling it.  We take delicate steps together unto long-untrodden ground.

Then in what way is the counsel contained in this epic material ‘at their disposal’? What do they use it for?  Well, novelisation - understood as bringing the epic onto a level with interiority and everyday experience - can go two ways.  The adolescent young people I work with very rarely 'knock it down' to meet earthy everyday life in the way Bakhtin described.  Their engagement with it is playful but not always subversive. It frequently seems to be more about raising their personal experience up to meet the epic on its own archetypal plane.  Or something in between.  A young woman with whom I collaborated on a retelling of an Italian folktale drew on her own poetry written in moments of great emotion or insight.  She described this process of conscious novelisation afterwards: 'I was looking to myself and what I would do or feel.'

In fact, strikingly often, young people use epic to dignify their own experience – experience that sometimes seems uncelebrated, isolating and uncommunicable.  ‘Dignifying’ – what do I mean? Simply transcribing this experience onto the archetypal paths of counsel, simultaneously allowing it to reshape these.  In this way the rupture is healed and experience becomes communicable again.  At a sufficient epic distance, universality is re-established: say, between the teenage self-harmer and the young hero on an impossible quest up the glass mountain.  You see the same in novels and theatre: think of Jeanette Winterson’s parallels (in 'Sexing the Cherry') between her lesbian or transgender characters and the mermaids and dancing princesses of legend.  The apparently untraversable gap, between the young people's experience, mine and that of all the storytellers and storylisteners that went before, shrinks for a while.  There is no need to be contrived about this – it happens by itself.  I often don't see it til long after a workshop and I assume they do not either.  Story is a mutually comprehensible language which can re-frame adolescent experience, and be re-shaped in turn by it.  Thus lines of communication can be opened and I, at least, feel the better for it.  


REFERENCES

•         Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) 'Epic and Novel' in The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas.

•         Benjamin, Walter (1973(1955)) ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’ in Hannah Arendt (ed). Illuminations. London: Fontana.

•         Kearney, Richard (2002) On Stories: thinking in action. London: Routledge.

'Storyknowing': A Symposium and Festival on Storytelling and Theatre with Young People

WHEN? Fri 22nd and Sat 23rd April 2016 

WHERE? York St John University and York Theatre Royal

WHO? Researchers, practitioners, teachers and young people (12-18)

Advance notice of ICAN's biggest practice research event yet: a two-day festival and symposium to explore the artform of storytelling for, with and by young people.  It will both disseminate our research, and contribute to it - threads from the workshops, talks, discussions and performances will be tied together into a short film, and perhaps ultimately into a book. 

Story is the way human beings make sense of the world they live in.  A story does not tell us what to think - it poses questions and leaves spaces for us to interpret them together.  It carries wisdom and experience, and asks us to add our own wisdom and experience before passing it on.  Therefore stories – whether modern, mythical, traditional or fantastical – are particularly important to help young people to position their own lives and difficulties in a wider context, and to become critical, responsible, problem-solving adults. 

The ‘narrative turn’ in literature and the social sciences (Kearney 2002, Meretoja 2014) has been mirrored in community arts practice.  Storytellers and theatre practitioners, ever more conscious of the impact on young people’s wellbeing of prevalent narratives of individualism, academic competition, physical perfection and social division, are increasingly seeking to provide alternative narratives for them to explore. Story is well and truly back at the centre of practice with young people.

And yet many young people may rarely hear or have the chance to work with stories.   The revival in performance storytelling has tended to favour adults and the very young, neglecting teenagers and older children.  ICAN’s research has found that secondary teachers, often constrained by tightly planned skills-focused curricula from reading a whole novel (OFSTED 2012), wish to ensure pupils’ access to stories; recent conferences on child and adolescent mental health have featured opportunities to build professionals’ confidence and capacity to use personal or fictional stories in their work. 

So what kinds of stories do young people need to hear?  What do they find in them, and how do they use them to put across their own perspectives?  How should we make the most of their power in our practice?  How should practitioners develop a participatory practice of storytelling? In what ways is this challenging to, or congruent with, current trends in education, mental health and youth work?

This festival and symposium will bring together practitioners, teachers, academics and young people to explore, through workshops, performances, discussions and outstanding practice, how we can use story to enrich drama and arts practice with young people.  It will also be about performance both by and for young people, showcasing both professional performances developed specifically for audiences aged 11-18, and performances by teenagers across various artforms.

BOOKING PAGE here 
There will be calls for papers (CfP) issued on research and practitioner networks, as well as on the ICAN website.

Enquiries: cath.heinemeyer@yorksj.ac.uk

Wormwood in the Garden

For the Love Arts Festival of Arts and Mental Health, some young people (from a mental health setting) and I devised a storytelling piece, based on Italo Calvino's folktale, Wormwood.  One young woman performed it with me and added her own poetry to amplify the emotions of these puzzling, cipher characters.  You can see a recording of it here and her blog post describing the process here . 

It was an inspiring and challenging process, provoking lots of questions for me about the nature of folktale and what it can do, which for now I simply present for your delectation / befuddlement.

The eloquence of non-engagement

My work in the adolescent mental health setting has been even more challenging than usual recently, with a difficult constellation of inpatients and a change of venue to a more distracting room.  Often only a handful of young people join me for the storytelling sessions, and only a couple are still there at the end. Meanwhile, these few have engaged intensely and enthusiastically, and produced some beautiful work in their own artforms based on story.

It was in this context that I had a 'research chat' (I would say 'trialogue' but it sounds too grandiose, or 'interview' but that would be pushing the point) with the two teachers in the setting, some of my firmest and most perceptive allies in all I am doing.  We looked into the reasons that many young people don't come, or leave part-way through.

The most challenging for me to consider is the fact that I often have an 'expectation' of 'something in return' for a story.  We recognised that almost all the young people love listening to a story - the rest and privacy it gives them, the absorption in a storyworld away from their difficulties.  But they know I will lead from that into a follow-up activity - a storytelling game, or creative writing exercise - which will demand an element of performance.   No matter how low-key this seems to me, for some young people it is too big a risk to turn up at all. Perhaps they will be judged or assessed or analysed. I have to remember the framing of their lives here - being permanently 'under the microscope' as some of them rage - and their lifetime of school experience in which almost every activity has a measurable learning outcome.  Such apparent open-endedness can only be suspect, or disorienting.

Then there is the power of symbolism.  These young people are strikingly intelligent and self-critical.  While the archetypes of myth and folktale might be an other-worldly common language, of great value in the right 'transitional space', they are just too obviously near to autobiography for some of these young people whose lives and emotions are in turmoil.  It is not possible to 'play' with things that are too hot to handle.  The 'storyworld' might be a place of danger rather than escape.  No matter how many times I assure them I am not a therapist and have no designs to analyse or heal them, the thickness of the atmosphere may contradict this for them.

There is, too, the 'discomfort' factor - the workshops involve sitting down quite a bit; the young people do not control the physical space as they would in other group activities designed to relax them away from their difficulties for a space and let their minds free-flow (like, say, cooking).  Thus unlike other groups, there is not the same element of escape from one's demons.  Although I often bring plasticine, yarn, beans to shell...it must be hard for them to overcome their desire to roam and escape the intensity of the moment, especially in the distracting space of the lounge.  There might be great value to their learning to weather the discomfort for sake of getting to a shared space of fun and creativity, but who am I to say that this is an achievable journey?

Then there is the adolescent suspicion of story and play - these are older teenagers for whom play has lost its charm and not yet regained it.  And finally, certainly not least, for some young people there is the sheer joyful empowerment of refusal.  We all felt there is considerable value to us turning up every day (in their case), every week (in mine), cheerful and consistent and pleased to see them, ready to be rejected or to fail another day, and then be back again the next morning.

All of these things call into profound question my belief in the 'other room' of the story, that a meeting of minds is possible in that room separate from the conditions and anxieties prevailing in the world next door.  That in that other room, people can take on different roles than they habitually do and meet as artists, be seen and appreciated for their strengths.  Yet this is a play space which can only exist under certain conditions, very difficult to achieve in this setting.

So one solution would be: I should just tell stories.  Clearly demarcated by music or simple handwork activities.  Many more young people would come along and would get something from it - the stories would stay with them to return to over the years.  This would be much more faithful to the core idea of the storytelling exchange: a story is told as a gift, the listener lends their ear as a gift, then the two go their separate ways, both enriched.  A more 'advanced' goal of getting to dialogue, genuine creative encounter between artists, is perhaps usually inappropriate to this setting.  Does an ill person want to be (benefit from being) in close dialogue with other ill people?  Am I treading on very dangerous territory here?

And yet I am not ready to give up on the power of play and retelling.  Because some individuals have stated in so many words their joy in playing together in the storyworld, knowingly perhaps but with great spark.  Because too, some groups in the ever-shifting parade of this community have seized certain stories and turned them into powerful satires, or used them to address the outside world. What right have I to claim all the storytelling role for myself, if there are such desires?  And related to this, because for a few young people story and related artforms are a way to start charting paths back out into life - to the theatre, to other identities they are experimenting with.

What this leads us to is an understanding that I need to do more to demarcate the storytelling space itself as a place where nothing will be demanded.  A gift only (and which can only be given if they choose).  I can use music, I can give undertakings and timings.  Thus the storyworld and its potential for free-floating will be available to everyone.  And (this is a bit Zen) by giving up any hope that we will get into the play space that lies beyond, I will therefore make it possible that just sometimes we will.  Some people will drift off and those few who have the will and ability to pass the many barricades will stay.  And we will fail and fail again, and see what happens!

Starting to write my exegesis

The time has come for me to make an attempt to tie the threads of my learning over the past (nearly) two years into an exegesis - a short thesis which will explain the theoretical and practice-based grounding of my work.  

I have just re-read something I wrote in May - an attempt to pithily summarise 'the main point' of my research - my main, kernel finding.  Here it is for your edification!

I start from the position that young people benefit from genuine, ‘I-Thou’ dialogue with caring adults, that adults are enriched by such open-ended encounter with adolescents, but that this is difficult to achieve in institutional settings.  Thus different means of communication are needed from those used habitually in institutions and this is where I believe story enters.

The sparseness of story makes it inherently responsive to context, in that it requires ‘rehydration’ in each setting, transposition to the chronotope and particular context of each telling.  The storyteller must, however, be sparing and leave gaps for the listeners to stitch the story to their own experience.   

As the storyteller can only call on her own experiential vocabulary to perform this delicate task, and the listeners can only call on theirs to fill in the gaps, and these two processes are often simultaneous and reflexive, what results is a dialogue ‘in another room’ between their respective knowledges.  This ‘other room’ is a bounded place in which different discourses can be accommodated and then orchestrated, by both the storyteller and other participants; thus the boundaries of discourses and the existence of alternatives can be more clearly seen, and there can be negotiation to create new meanings and (imperfectly) shared understandings.  The story-world is also a place where all present can operate on a higher and roughly equal plane of understanding, because of the innate human tendency to think in narrative. 

The muscles being exercised are those of developing a responsible discourse of causalities, of recognising the ultimate unfathomability of the world while assuming the role of one who can help to shape it with others.

This ‘other room’, the story-world, is an inter-subjective place where no-one’s knowledge is sufficient and everyone’s is necessary, thus not even the storyteller can know her way around at the outset, nor can she have preordained goals for what should happen there.   While the institution’s goals may infiltrate, they are present usually only to the extent that one or more parties allow them in. 

Moreover, the story-world is a place no-one can be forced to enter, or to stay in once there, and the ultimate dampener of the storyteller’s hubris is the onus on her to ask the listeners for the gift of their listening.  Thus there will be many occasions when there is no meeting of ‘I’ and ‘Thou’, no real dialogue, sometimes because listeners are not disposed to listen.  On other occasions, failure will result because the storyteller puts her blinkers on and navigates the story-world using her own pre-planned route, or seeks to bind listeners into it against their will.  

The Profligacy of Practice-as-Research

I have given four symposium talks in the past two months and in each case my greatest challenge was choosing the best moments from my practice to illustrate the points I was making.  To trawl through my memory, or through the vast bank of field notes I have accumulated in what now must be hundreds of hours of storytelling sessions with groups of young people.  I become wistful, reading through other people's more crystalline papers which carry a clear narrative of (say) a ten-week project, which gives them more than abundant experience and examples to come to realisations, contextualise them against theory, and make their point.

My work seems in comparison open-ended, hugely time-consuming and profligate.  Such an overwhelming proportion of it will never be written up.  Like a cherry tree covered in blossom that never leads to much fruit, it almost makes it harder, not easier, to draw communicable lessons from it.

Of course there are several 'buts' here, and here they come.  Firstly, of course, the major attraction of this PhD for me was the opportunity to do extended, reflective practice, becoming embedded in settings and being able to respond to the interests and needs of the young people I found there.  (This is something a freelance storyteller, indeed artist, can rarely do for the simple reason that they have to charge for their time and every institution is broke) This has given me more riches than I could ever have expected.  My skin has thickened, my instincts have been tuned, my range and repertoire has been stretched in every direction.  I am incorporating this learning, these 'findings', into my own self, whether I choose to or not.  The challenge, of course, is to be able to continue to articulate this practitioner's understanding in intelligible words.

Secondly, the whole relationship between practice and theory in PaR is different from that between 'fieldwork' and a mainstream PhD.  The practice is not simply something you extract knowledge from in order to be able to tell others; it is the research and it is also a major (the major?) way in which the research findings are expressed.  I was told this right at the beginning by my supervisors, but it's taken me a long time to grasp what it means in practice.  That's why you don't stop doing practice when you have enough to say; it's rather almost as if I keep going until each project has 'worked itself out', finished itself or found a happy conclusion.  So the practice leads and largely sets the pace of the research.  Once more, the challenge is to keep sight of the need to write, crystallise, shape this experience into a form accessible to the academy.

Thirdly, the dissemination of the research is as much through the relationships formed during it, as by what is written at the end of it or even presented in papers.  This is what leaves traces on young people, teachers, youth workers, decision-makers, institutions, as well as of course on me.  The quality, potential and durability of these relationships thus feels like a yardstick of the quality and impact of the research.  So in one of my settings, where relationships have been curtailed by instititutional pressures and gaps I can work in have closed up prematurely, the 'research' cannot be said to have 'happened' in the same sense that it has in another setting, where more and more opportunities keep opening up and a dialogic, collaborative research relationship with the practitioners and young people keeps bearing fruit.  Even though I have spent just as much time in the first setting, told just as many stories there.  A single researcher cannot 'make the research happen' just by planning it, any more than you could make a marriage happen by proposing to someone.  It's a two-way (or three-way, or many-way) thing.  At the risk of repeating myself, the challenge remains to transcend the particularity of these many dialogues to be able to draw some conclusions that are useful to those you have never met.

 

Casting stories in plaster - and just hanging around

York Open Studios is a great thing.  I was visiting local artists whose work I had never seen before, and so found myself peering at at the very intriguing cubes of Doug James.  These are bundles of memory, like cubic doll's houses full to bursting with artefacts and words and images, so you want to make yourself tiny and be able to look inside.  Doug saws up old books and cassettes, plasters and sticks and paints and bungs in sweetie wrappers, bits of diary, cinema tickets, everything that helps him tell the story of a particular person, occasion or time period of his life.  Some things cannot be contained in the cube, and spill out like tears or excess.

We immediately realised we were engaged in similar work in different media, so I invited Doug to come and lead a workshop at the adolescent mental health setting where I go every week.  We gathered up swathes of material and worked with five young women all morning.  They were characteristically quick to decide what stories they wanted to tell, whether of their favourite places or of family members, and lateral-thinking about how to use Doug's techniques to do so.  Here are some of the results:

Really this session exemplified for me what I have come to treasure about my current role, particularly in this setting.  I am not engaged in a ten-week project with a particular end date and outputs in mind, but I am a sort of usually welcome hanger-around.  Indeed, I am not just passively welcomed but actively supported in practical ways.  And so a sort of gift-and-opportunity relationship develops, in which little is planned in advance but opportunities are offered and taken up.  An artist is available to work for free - well then I can get him in, will next week be OK?  Materials are required - well then the setting works hard to gather them.  A conference on young people's mental health is coming up - then shall we create a story to put forward the inpatients' perspective?  I won't manage to do all this work with the young people myself - well then the staff find the time to work with them between my visits.  There are some free seats at the theatre tonight - would any of the young people like them? Yes and one of them is interested in work experience at the theatre, could that be arranged?  None of these things could ever have been foreseen at the outset.

My supervisor I recently met with the setting's chief psychiatrist and told him about the organic flourishing and multiplying effect of this work in this setting.  We agreed that it clearly springs from the flexibility my role allows me, along with the setting's responsiveness.  We also recognised that this is an almost unique position these days, like the early days of the community arts movement when pioneering artists simply took up residence in a community.  We explored together whether it would be possible in any form to continue this work beyond my PhD, whether with me or another artist - but it was hard to envisage any such funding model.

Ironically, even the prophets of efficiency in public services might have to admit that this 'hanging around' is an efficient model of funding arts work.  I am free to see opportunities arise and grab them, and the setting responds in kind.  My time, if costed, might come to a couple of thousand pounds a year.  The list of 'outputs' from this couple of £K is certainly longer than it would have been with a more structured project.