Monday's Quote: Paul St. Pierre On The Art of Story

"Art outlives us.

Storytelling, dancing, song, sculpture and painting are all essential parts of human existence, as I learned late.  For too much of my life I thought of them as merely frosting on life's cake.

Here, I confine my comments to the only art in which I can claim any expertise, the telling of stories.  Even that I once disdained and until quite late in life, after a few successes such as The Education of Phylistine and Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse, stories that remained in print and copyright longer than almost any other Canadian works in the last half of the twentieth century, I was still unsure as to whether they were worth anything and nagged by the suspicion that writing was no way for a grown man to earn a living.

Now I know otherwise.  Those two stories and perhaps a few others will outlive me by a generation or more.  Information about whether my mortgage was paid off, the size of my credit card bills and such stuff is less than a soup made from the shadow of the wing of a passing dove.  The arts live longer than anything else.  Of them all, the telling of stories is one of the greatest. and those who do not do this for their grandchildren neglect both a joy and a duty.  Every generation needs stories told by those who went before.

I offer an example, a classic great story. I wish I had told it but the author was an unknown Lakota who died a century or so ago. Out of a commonplace observation that men and dogs have a special relationship, he created a story that lives on as a masterpiece. This is the translation:

In the beginning, men and the other animals were the same and could speak with one another.  But the Great Spirit became angry with man and decided to separate them.  He called them all together on the floor of the desert, the man on one side, all of the other animals on the other side, and with his thumbnail he made a mark in the sand between them.

The mark he made grew deeper.  It went right down to the centre of the earth.  It grew wider and wider, man standing on one side, all other other animals on the other side.

Just when it seemed that man was going to be alone forever the dog made a tremendous jump and took his place beside the man.

This is no old man prattling, this is an inspired professional teller of stories.  All he has to offer is commonplace, that men and dogs are close.  There is nothing more, and everybody already knows it.  He could have told it all in one or two sentences:  "The Great Spirit decided to separate man from the other animals but the dog stayed with man."  But that's a narrative, not a story.

The difference is fundamental.  Narratives are valuable, we use them all the time:  they are an account, true or fictional, of a series of events.  It is the twist of the narrative that creates a story that excites our imagination, touches our heart and is remembered and retold during the dark nights of winter.

Observe this Lakota professional plying his trade.  First, he obtains what every storyteller needs, the willing suspension of disbelief.  Did you stop reading because some being cut the planet in half with his thumbnail?  The original author could have made the whole matter too easy and uneventful.  The dog could have simply stepped across the line with no risk when it was only a centimetre wide.  Instead he made the dog wait until the gap was almost unbridgeable.

But there is a factor more important than all the preceding.  It is the essence of the art of storytelling.  He made the audience take part in creating the story.  Any great storyteller  arouses questions he does not attempt to answer.  All who hear this story are left to write most of it themselves."

----from Paul St. Pierre's excellent book of essays, Old Enough To Know Better (2002)

In this essay, Paul St. Pierre continues to elaborate on just what it is that the listener must provide to complete this story.  This was aptly defined as "recalcitrance" by Austin Wright, who coined the literary sense of the word and used a novel to illustrate the concept in his brilliant study: Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the Professors.

Eoin McManee, interviewed by Declan Burke at this link, says that a novel should be "an attempt to apprehend the transcendent."  I heartily agree.

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it." --Hannah Arendt 

Saturday's Best Book Diary: SORROW WOOD by Raymond L. Atkins

Sorrow Wood by Raymon L. Atkins, published by Medallion Press, Inc., printed in U. S. A., 2009.


Dustjacket:  This is one where the scan does no justice.  The dustjacket picture is beautiful and surreal, a broken down tobacco barn, personified if you look closely with loft windows for eyes.  The metalic blue floral designs yinning up and yanging down on either side of the title help add to its almost telepathic southern gothic vibe.  The cover design is credited to Adam Mock, the book design is credited to James Tampa.


Opening line:  "Wendell Blackmon considered the dead dog lying before him and wiped his sweating brown with a white handkerchief pulled from his back pocket."


I enjoyed the book, but I had misgivings about the opening sentence and indeed about the killing of the dog.  Mindless cruelty to animals is a jarring opening note, unless reincarnation and karma is involved or at least implied--such as when the monkey dies in the opening pages of Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke: A Novel.  Two fine novels involving dog reincarnation immediately spring to mind:  Pam Houston's Sight Hound: A Novel and Garth Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel.


Premise:  This novel is a love story involving a secular view of reincarnation.  The book creates its own mythic universe and is true only to its own rules.  There is a mystery but not one that whines and pulls you ahead like a greyhound on a leash.  The significance of the "murder mystery" may not even dawn upon you until the very last page.  But here the love story and the slow unfolding of character are everything.


Sheriff Wendell Blackmon and his wife, Reva, are the protagonists.  Reva is a church-going Methodist who remembers bits and pieces of their past lives together and it is important to her that they find each other again in the next reincarnation.


This sets up the main tension in the book for this reader.  The rest was just slow, ambling, southern story-telling, both corny and gothic, subtle and wordy, troublesome and compassionate, the unfolding of history and character and destiny, and character is destiny.


I found the book easy to read, but a lot of readers might have to adjust their reading tempo a bit.  As I say, the narrative voice and the pace of events is southern and in no particular hurry and the story is often told with humorous circumlocution.


I recall years ago recommending T. R. Pearson's Cry Me a River (another little known gem).  Some otherwise fine readers I know told me that they just couldn't get into it, that they couldn't get their minds around the narrative voice, that the prose was just too slow for them.  They said much the same about John Dufresne's excellent and wildly humorous southern novels, Louisiana Power & Light and Deep in the Shade of Paradise.


Many northerners have not yet learned to see any difference between southern accents, of which there are many.  Not all southerners speak with a slow drawl.  Think of the casting of the remake of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men--with one or two exceptions, the accents were terrible, as if they had deliberately cast foreigners to play those parts--and except for Linda Clarkson, they did.


On the other hand, my wife and I recently listened to the amusing Joan Hess story, "Hillbilly Cat," read by actress Jean Smart, best known for her role in television's Designing Women.  The lady speaks fast and southern naturally like dozens of other women we know, and her nuanced voice added greatly to the humor of the story.  About a cat who seemed to be Elvis reincarnated.


It might take an actor or actress with the talent of Jean Smart to do justice to an audiobook of the novel at hand, Raymond L. Atkin's Sorrow Wood.  Reading it, you'll have to find a voice to hear it in that makes it comfortable for you.  Here, the natural way the story is told is a part of its charm.