CSotD: The Storytellers: Finding the There
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An interesting juxtaposition this week as Roger Landgridge shuts down Hotel Fred, a daily project he explains in this final installment, while Richard Marcej re-starts "The Blabbing Baboon," his daily graphic journal, which had gone dormant while (spoiler alert) he took on a temporary position that involved a killer commute.
On a superficial level, the two projects could not be more different — a gag strip versus a memoir — but the central concept is the shout of "We're here" in "Horton Hears a Who," in which tiny creatures proclaim their presence to avoid being destroyed.
If a storyteller stops telling stories, does he still exist?
I take this personally: There is a Whovian impulse in this blog, which not only proclaims my continued existence to the world but also to myself: It's a mental warmup each morning, the intellectual equivalent of a good run and probably releases comparable endorphins and, like that run, something I do for myself because … well, because.
Which brings up the question "Why am I doing this?" that everyone should ask themselves continuously.
I keep hearing people talk about their "bucket lists" and it makes me wonder at the misery of lives spent accumulating regrets and omissions.
There is not a speck of difference between Edith Piaf's dramatic, defiant "Non, je ne regrette rien" and Mehitabel the Cat's offhand shrug of wotthehell, but a universe between their world and that of a person who can actually list the things she'd rather have done with her life.
However, there is a second part to the question of the Storyteller's identity: If you tell a story and nobody hears it, does the storyteller exist?
It's not just a matter of measuring audience: There are highly successful musicians who would rather play a small, intimate room of aficianados than fill a stadium of hooting drunkards, and one of the pitfalls of fame is the ability to attract attention for work that doesn't deserve it.
Tom Spurgeon links to an interesting essay on R. Crumb's "Book of Genesis," which includes this short video in which Crumb discusses his fuzzy motivations for tackling the work:
There is a fascinating tension between his claim that he did it for the substantial paycheck and the passion with which he discusses the folkloric nature of the Bible, and I feel quite certain that he is aware of the degree to which he is working to convince himself of what he ostensibly is explaining to us.
I doubt he believes it, nor do I think he's lying, and there's your tension.
It's a tension that has been on my mind for awhile, because the explosion of graphic novels and memoirs has, as happens when any art form becomes popular, brought forth a flood of drek along with the rare gems.
One of the things not on my bucket list is to write a novel. In fact, I wrote two of them, and I daily thank god I did it before the Internet dangled the possibility of posting them, because they were hopelessly uninteresting. That's not false modesty, but the result of discovering that I have a gift for writing but not the gift of a James Joyce, who could make fascinating a story otherwise of stupefying normalcy.
I finally sent it off to an established critic, begging him to tell the truth. He responded with several pages of brutal honesty summed up as "everybody went to college and nobody needs — or wants — to read about it."
Fortunately, it hit at a time when I was beginning to find more rewarding things to write about, and ways to write, which is the point where — whatever your medium, whatever your genre — you become a storyteller.
But it's a process, and not everyone gets through it. There are any number of graphic memoirs and web cartoons and other forms in which people with no story to tell hammer us with the ordinary, which brings to mind the priest whose duties included weekly confessions from the sisters in a local convent.
He compared the experience to "being nibbled to death by ducks."
That does not explain Harvey Pekar and American Splendor, in which a very unlikeable fellow with a very unremarkable life tells very ordinary stories from which you cannot turn away.
But here is the critical distinction: Imagine if one of those nuns, though her sins of unkind thoughts or momentary impatience were no more dramatic than those of her sisters, confessed to you how those small imperfections kept her from achieving her spiritual goals and fulfilling the all-encompassing life she had chosen?
That pained, thoughtful conversation might be the highlight of your week.
And a graphic memoir on that level could be American Splendor or Fun Home or Blankets.
Only a very few graphic memoirs recognize and bring forward the small moments that transform "ordinary" into "universal," which is when we begin to care about Leopold Bloom or Willie Loman.
And, if lack of dramatic action makes it harder to tell a story that matters, simply inserting dramatic action is certainly not the cure.
I recently read a much-praised, award-winning volume of graphic stories that boiled down to
A. Characters are confronted with a problem
B. Everybody runs around smashing things and yelling
C. Problem solved
That's also not a story. There is no there there, and no matter how much manufactured chaos you insert, you cannot force a there where this is no there.
Here, rather, in the words of Stephan Dedalus, is what makes a storyteller:
He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.
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