I found a bunch of scribbled notes that I had meant to incorporate in my last long post, but they got forgotten, so I thought why not make one more post-let and add them. (This is in reference to the long post that starts here so you may need to read that to make sense of this.)
Two of the notes had to do with the issue of narrative events (storytellings) versus narrated events (what goes on in stories), and how today’s movies and television feature narrated events and obscure narrative events.
First, do you remember how Mister Rogers, Captain Kangaroo and Romper Room used to talk to you? (If you are too young to know, check the links to find out what these things are.) I remember feeling as though each of these people was talking to me, personally; but it was always clear that they were real people on a real stage (you could usually see the stage) and that we were participating in an event together, as real people. In contrast, I’ve been watching some assorted kid’s videos with my six-year-old, and I noticed that today, it’s not people who address the audience, it’s characters. Dora the Explorer talks directly to viewers, as do the kids in PBS’ Super Why series. This is a perfect example of how the narrated-event picture has enlarged beyond the narrative-event frame. The storytellers are gone from the picture; all we see is the inside of the story, as though it was the only real thing.
Second, I was thinking about the joke-after-a-joke when you tell about something funny, and people don’t get it, and then you say, “You had to be there.” I’ve noticed something lately, which is that people used to say that about things they had actually done, but I keep noticing people saying it about television and movies. I just took a look and verified that it’s not just me hearing it in person; it’s easy to find people making such references on the web. One person even said “You had to be there” and then, “thanks to YouTube you can.” The question is: you had to be where? Because, where were they? Inside the story, I think. I had noted this down as yet more evidence that people are viewing stories not as narrative events but as narrated events.
Finally, the third note I forgot to include was about qualification and illness and stories. I said that Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain became qualified to be a patient, with all its attendant rights and privileges, and then I said that was connected to people saying they were unqualified to tell stories. The obvious question is: if people don’t believe they are qualified to tell stories, what do they think they are qualified to do?
My guess is that tellers of Good Stories and members of Good Audiences are exclusive categories. In other words, being qualified to be a member of the Good Audience automatically disqualifies you from being a teller of Good Stories. If you try to be both, you will tip over to one side or the other. This explains the problem I mentioned several posts back, in the one on whether people tell stories, that once people start working with stories professionally they have a harder time telling natural stories, because they slip into thinking of themselves as tellers of Good Stories. And, that people who think they never tell stories are probably very secure in their identity as Good Audiences for Good Stories.
In The Magic Mountain, while Hans Castorp is fully qualified to be a patient, he would never presume to claim that he was qualified to be a doctor. There is even a hint that Director Behrens is breaking the rules by having a touch of tuberculosis himself:
… [C]an someone truly be the intellectual master of a power to which he is himself enslaved? Can he liberate if he himself is not free? To the average person, the idea of a sick physician remains a paradox, a problematical phenomenon. Instead of being intellectually enriched and morally strengthened by his experience, may he not perhaps find that his knowledge of the disease becomes clouded and confused? He no longer stares down the illness with a hostile eye; he is a biased and hardly unequivocal foe. With all due respect, one must ask whether someone who is part of the world of illness can indeed be interested in curing or even nursing others in the same way a healthy person can.
It is not the role of the doctor to know the disease intimately, to be “battered” by it, to be “enslaved” by it, to live with it — because it causes you to become “clouded and confused” as a good patient (in their obligation of passivity) should. It is the doctor’s role to stand outside the illness, to be “free” from it, to stare it down, to defeat it from a distance; and for that doctors must be active as well as knowledgeable.
Again translating the metaphors, the reason people react as if they are unqualified to tell stories is simply because they are qualified to do something else, and they cannot do both, by the rules of the hierarchy. It is not their role to tell; it is their role to listen, and to listen well. Reviving community storytelling would be helped by reducing the exclusivity of the two roles as well as by reducing the draw of both extremes, thereby allowing people to range more broadly in their identifications with respect to storytelling.
So, as I said, just some scribbles I found that I forgot to include.