In the Labyrinth

Old Bones, New Tales

This is an odd moment. Three book ideas I have been working on lately have suddenly come into clarity as a single cloth -- not as a trilogy mind you, for each is different enough from the other -- but organically they seem to spring from the same desire to write about early, middle, and late life. I feel as though on any given day, I could write in all three manuscripts without missing a beat. Two at least are set in Italy (thank god the research here helps both novels). The third is contemporary fantasy, so familiar ground.

As I am now in my sixties, I think this sudden meta-thinking about the novels has a lot to do with my age. When studying African oral narratives, I learned that women storytellers in South Africa (and probably in every traditional society) told the same stories (with some changes in emphasis depending on the audience) to all different ages. When the audience was a mixture young to old, the tales were meant to be entertaining and to introduce the very young to the artistry of story-telling. Other times it was intended for a specific audience such as young women going through rites of initiation, and there the same stories acquired an instructional emphasis, the tales focusing on transformation to adulthood.

However, older women also performed those same stories privately to each other. All of them so well versed in a lifetime of living and of telling those tales. They knew these stories intimately, and in the variants of the tales they told each other, there was depth and nuance in the performances. It was an opportunity for them to reflect and to comment through mature and evocative performances of the tales on their past rites of passage; their lives as young women, as wives or co-wives, as mothers, and now as elders. One of the great Xhosa storytellers Nongenile Masithathu Zenani towards the end of her life performed three, one-hundred-hour epics. Each epic was performed over about 21 days --with Masithathu speaking for 5 to 6 hours each day. And like Scheherazade, each morning she picked up the tale where she left off the night before. She composed the epics from the threads of the oral narrative stories she had learned and told throughout her life, intertwined with a wealth of cultural details and a social history of the Xhosa.  (I am still waiting to read one day the final translation of these three epics which were recorded and transcribed by Professor Emeritus Harold Scheub.)

As authors, we continue to reach back into the deep well of inherited stories -- the universality of rites of passage means every generation will want to hear them, read them, and connect to them. But unlike traditional society where the oral narratives and epics could be learned at the knee and then repeated (though different variants even within a culture suggest personal embellishment and emphasis in the telling), modern authors are always required to reinvent old tales and make them "fresh" -- sometimes with wonderful results and sometimes with stunningly bad ones. (I can never get over the dreadful Beowulf movies...Beowulf in Space, Beowulf with a Golden Stiletto-Heeled Monster mother).

So I guess this is the big challenge now for me. Trying to be faithful the tales, to take the time to reflect on how they have shaped and articulated different moments in my life, and yet, satisfy the craving to create something new, something "fresh" out of very old but venerable bones.

For more reading:

* Life Histories of African Women, edited by Patricia W. Romero which contains the autobiography of Nongenile Masithathu Zenani recorded, transcribed, and translated by Harlod Schueb.

**The Word and the World: Tales and Observations from the Xhosa Oral Tradtion. "A master storyteller of the Xhosa people of South Africa, Nongenile Masithathu Zenani gives us an unprecedented view of an oral society from within. Twenty-four of her complex and beautiful tales about birth, puberty, marriage, and work, as told to the renowned collector of African oral tradition, Harold Scheub, are gathered here. Accompanying the stories are Zenani’s detailed commentaries and analyses and Scheub’s striking photographs of her in performance.  The combination of these historical and cultural observations with a richly symbolic collection of tales from a single traditional storyteller make The World and the Word a remarkable document."

 

Art: Edward Hopper: In the Barber Shop, 11:00AM, Summer in the City

Orality and The Singer of Tales.

I am continuing with my notes on reading Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy, with some sidesteps to look at authors, whose work Ong references: Milman Parry and Albert Lord whose Singer of Tales is a fascinating study not only of the structure of Homer's Illiad and The Odyssey but also the important use of mnemonic devices in works that are orally performed and transmitted. So here are the key interesting ideas for me: 

Milman Parry analyzing Homer's Illiad and The Odyssey discover that every distinctive feature of Homer's poetry is due to the economy enforced on it by oral methods of composition. These were never performed the same, as poets in an oral culture do not "memorize" the text, but "stitched together prefabricated parts."  They recognized a collection of epithets (so many versions of "the wine-red sea") that had different meter lengths and could be used anywhere in the text as the poetry required. This certainly makes sense to me where both epics and tales were highly patterned -- usually the only consistent feature of different collected variants of the same epic or story. According to Harold Scheub's observations, even a child of five can be a reasonable good storyteller because she will have learned the patterning of the narrative, having it heard it repeated with every telling.  

Ong argues: "Homeric Greeks valued cliches because not only poets but the entire oral noetic world or thought-world relied upon the formulaic constitution of thought. In an oral culture, knowledge once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or would be lost." However, I would add, that the repetition itself, needed to be evocative and interesting, eliciting a variety of emotions out of the listener to engage them and that is when repetition becomes art, rather than a list of items to be recalled. Ong expresses David Bynum's ideas, (The Daemon in the Wood,1978) that "the clusters constitute the organizing principles of the formulas so that the essential idea is not subject to clear, straightforward formulation but is rather a kind of fictional complex held together largely in the unconscious." And so strong is the idea of the formulaic portions of storytelling that "they ride deep in the conscious and unconscious" and don't vanish the moment literacy is introduced, but often are reproduced even in early written form by those from the oral culture who have learned to write --mimicking at times the oral performance. (Amos Tutuola's brilliant The Palm Wine Drinkard is an excellent example of this -- although in Nigeria he received criticism, mainly from educated Nigerians because of what was perceived as low-class, uneducated English.)

I find this particularly interesting because when a fairy tale transforms from its oral version (which ironically we can only read in transcribed texts) into a literary tale, it runs the risk of losing its profound evocative nature. Repetition and patterning into forms organize the details of the story, creating tension when the human and the fantastic interact -- emphasizing not just the surface movement of the tale, but all the complicated feelings such arrangement of images brings forth to the listener. In some ways, it is closer to music (or indeed, singing the tale) -- we are aware of the patterning, the phrases, the way they move from introduction to increasing complicated arrangements and then a coda which feels like the beginning but isn't because of the experience of the journey to get to the end. There is for the analyst the social message -- what is the story trying to tell us? I think it's more a case of how is the story making the audience experience through its techniques, our lives as lived in that moment of the telling, and because our lives are always changing, allows us to hear the same tale over and over, and find in it something new.

Photo: "Griot" © Emile Snyder, 1963, Tittia Frasciotti, Galekea Women, 1988.

Putting Together My Father's Research With The Photos: West Africa 1963-64

Balafon performance in the streets of Conakry, Guinea. ©1963 Emile Snyder

Among the amazing documents that have floated my way over the years was a manilla folder full of gorgeous black and white photographs my father took in the Ivory Coast (well..they were developed there and some of them might have been also taken in Senegal, Mali, or Guinea). Among my mother's papers that I received after her death was a carefully cached collection of letters that my parents had written to each other during fall 1963 to spring of 1964, when they were both abroad on Ford and Fulbright grants-- he to numerous countries in West Africa and she to India, Bhutan, and Sikkim.

The letters are very interesting, and cringe worthy in places. One third love letters (with some surprising revelations about their sex life I could have survived never knowing about), one third about money (there was never enough and what there was always came late allowing for some desperate nail biting) and one third talking about the research and the separate lives they were having on their different continents.

As I read through the research parts of my Dad's letters, I learned a lot about these photographs--especially that he had done many field recordings of musicians, griots, and small village brass bands. He had made friends with many African writers at the very start of their careers as authors in 1963, he had met and become friends with Leopold Senghor, President of Senegal, and other writers and poets turned diplomats -- who also gave him music tapes and recordings (especially the radio stations eager to get their music out to the West as well as Africa.). He sent 25 or so tapes back to the states with friend and ethno-musicologist Robert Garfias who returned them to the Ethnomusicology Archives  at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA.

I went looking for the tapes in the archives -- as this was the first I knew that they had been properly given over to someone. I was so excited to find them listed here and here. So I will be sending scans of all the photos (plus more of the notes I discovered in his letters) to the archive there -- delighted that future students will have a chance to see these images and connect them to the music on the tapes. In many ways, the best part of finding all these papers is being able to share the really great parts of their careers with others -- to share those moments in history where they saw something, heard something, or wrote something that still matters.

All the photos can be found here -- or by clicking the link to "West African Musicians" in the left hand side bar. And all photos are ©1963 Emile Snyder -- please email me at the blog to request permission to use these photos.

The Shaping of Story: Working Through Ideas

My notes on re-reading Harold Scheub's work on oral narrative structures, and performance. They have  shaped the way I think of the fantastic in narrative and how it functions, and by extension how those "electric moments" when the real and the fantastic push against each to create a charged metaphorical experience in the performance (and perhaps in my context as writer, in the creation of the text.) Scheub's voluminous writings on Story and Performance continue to challenge my thinking and my writing every time I go back and re-read his work. 

Notes from Harold Scheub's Story : a really clear and detailed understanding of how story in the oral traditions become a focal point for harmonizing the different, idiosyncratic experiences and histories of the members of an audience. These are performances, and the meanings of the tale, from didactic to metaphorical occur in the performance as a reaction to the images and the aesthetic patterning of the tale to create a surface narrative from conflict to resolution while meaning is generated in the layering of emotionally evocative and metaphorical imagery. Within the performance the audience has a personal encounter with what is both familiar in the narrative and what can be interpreted and reinterpreted throughout the listener's life. (c.f. the child who hears the story, the young woman engaged in puberty rights, the new mother, wife or co-wife, the older woman who is telling the story to audiences of mixed ages or just her peers.)

Story is a combination of image and emotions, narrative movement, of form or patterning, the layering of imagery that results in story. The images are pulled from the inherited cache of emotionally evocative images which are paired with contemporary, more realistic images and their interaction in the story create a flashpoint. It is not in the suspension of disbelief that enables meaning but in the moment of tension in the pairing ("electric opposition") of the contemporary realistic images with the fantastic, ancient images which contain the deepest dreams, hopes, fears, nightmares of a world experience.

The storyteller organizes the images and the narrative in a surface movement from conflict to resolution, while at the same time patterning the emotionally evocative images into tropes that allow the audience to discover the nature of the relationship and its significance and meaning. The principle objective of the fantastic imagery is a poetic reorganization of the real -- and by the contrast to provide a new layer of meaning in the real.

Fantastic images provide a world of connections, of transformations, of metaphorical relations between the real and marvelous, and because many are inherited from a shared historical past, they will also contain fragments of history, ancient traditions that are reconstituted in a new way for contemporary understanding. Supernatural villains & helpers become manifestations of the struggle occurring to the protagonist. The fantastic elements are not an end into themselves, but as a means to push the story towards the metaphorical. It becomes the engine of change bringing the audience out to where uncertainty exists and then back to the familiar. The power of the tale is not one that emerges with a glimmering metaphor -- the performance of tale itself is the experience of metaphor and that is its power. 

Fantasy tales are a form of reasoning, a way of looking at events in the context of emotion.The combination of the fantasy and the real in the stories provides a new measure of the real world. The blending of the two, not just fantasy alone is important because without the mooring of the real world, the fantasy would be dull -- fantasy breaks our world into artificial pieces and as the storyteller combines the images of reality with the introduction of fantasy, reality finds itself within a fantastic context, forcing our thinking about those matters into new modes. 

Kora, Calabash, and Drum: West African Musicians, Photographs circa 1964

My father Emile Snyder was a professor of African Literature and Languages, specializing in contemporary African Literature written in French and English. He taught at a number of universities, including the University of Wisconsin - Madison, the University of Dar- es Salaam, Tanzania, and Indiana University. In 1964 when he was just embarking on a career change from 17th century French literature to African Literature, he received a fullbright to do research on African contemporary literature in West Africa. While he was there he met and interviewed many emerging African authors and had a chance to visit quite a bit of the west coast -- thriteen countries in all. I have decided to post an amazing series of photos he took of a huge festival/procession in a small village that brought together a wide range of musicians and griots (itinerant praise poets.) You can see the entire collection in an album in the right-hand sidebar column. Read and view more photographs >>>