Translator: Juliana Marín
Reviewer: Peter van de Ven Missing the arrow. It's easy to imagine how an archer
can shoot an arrow and miss the target. It's equally easy if you know
a bit about storytelling to imagine how an archer
might miss the arrow before they even get to the target. In order to understand
how that might be possible, I'll tell you about
a storytelling festival I was working at
a couple of years ago. I happened to be compèring, which is like the kiss of death
to somebody in a job like mine. It means you have
six storytellers to put on stage, they all have to stick to time,
not fight each other, do their stories right, get off stage,
everything has to go smoothly. If anything goes wrong, you have no power
but all the responsibility as the compère. And I finished 20 minutes early. And I was left with a marquee
full of 200 people who'd just arrived in trains and cars and were settling down
for a storytelling weekend, and I had to find something
to fill the time. So I decided the first thing I could do
was tell them a story about storytelling. At the moment, the only story
I could think of was this one: The rabbi of Dubno was famous for always
answering every question with a story and for always having a story
for every occasion. Somebody asked him once
how he managed it, and his answer was this: "That reminds me of a story. It's the story of a king,
many years ago, who just wanted to be a good archer
but he could not, because he could not find
anybody to teach him. He happened to be riding sadly
around his kingdom one day when he came down a country lane
and saw a barn at the end of a farmyard, and from the far side of the barn
there was a familiar sound. It was the sound of SHH-TK! SHH-TK! The sound of an arrow hitting a target. He made his way round
the back of the barn, and what did he see
but 80 yards down the field? A little boy, no more
than 11 or 12 years old, a bow in one hand
and an arrow in the other, and there, at the other end of the field, was a barn wall that you
could hardly see for targets. And at the center
of every target was an arrow. The king asked the child,
'Did you do that?' The child nodded. And the king said,
'How did you manage it?' And with all the artless candor of youth,
the child responded: 'Well, all you do is get your feet
straight, underneath your shoulders, take the bow in the bow-hand
and don't grip it too tight, take the arrow, make sure
the cock-feather is outwards, one finger above, two fingers below,
clear your mind completely until there isn't a thought in your head. Then you raise, and you aim,
and you anchor. And then you gaze at the target. And without twanging the string -
it is archery and not music - you let the string go, the arrow flies
through the air, you follow through, the arrow strikes the wall ... and then you paint the target around it.'" (Laughter) I told this story,
I filled the 20 minutes, and I went down thinking,
"Job well done." But afterwards in the bar,
people were coming to me and saying, "Ah, that was a great joke;
I'm gonna tell it." And the word "joke" fell on my ears
like a funeral knell. Because I knew that I had failed. Because it's not a joke. And I had to sit down and ask myself why. And I thought, the reason is
that I told the story without saying anything at all
about the context from which it came. And that's important. The Rabbi of Dubno
was not a fictional character. His name was Yaakov Krantz
and he was real. He made his living wandering around
Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, telling stories and preaching sermons. He knew hundreds and hundreds of them,
he really, genuinely did, and his stories went
into rabbinical tradition, which is compendious, and it survives to our own day
in the oral storytelling traditions not only of the rabbis, but also of ... figures like this. Edith Marks is one of my favorite artists because she's one
of my favorite storytellers. I don't know when exactly she was born,
but she was working as a storyteller in her own Jewish communities
in the Netherlands, from about the mid 1920s right through 1985,
which was about the time she died. And she was a class of storyteller that refer to themselves
by the Yiddish term "Drut'syla." What that means in a nutshell
is that she was a hereditary - they were always hereditary - female - they were always female - storyteller in residence to the Jewish community
of which she was a part. The tradition was passed on
from grandmother to granddaughter; there she is as a young woman,
and there she is in the mid 80s, towards the end of her life. One of the last things she did
as a practising storyteller was to pass on the tradition
in its entirety to her granddaughter, Shanaleah Bat Avram,
who's with us tonight - sat at the front to make sure
I don't get any details wrong. And if you look at the ways
the Drut'sylas told stories and the ways they learned them, and if you remember that the story
of the Rabbi of Dubno and his arrow was one small part
of that whole tradition, and if you place the story of the arrow
back in the context of that tradition, then you can see that it has
a whole range of meanings which it simply doesn't have
if you pluck the story from its context in the heat of the moment, as I did. There are two things that are obvious
about the story in it's context which aren't obvious when you remove
the story from that context. The first is that it is
a warning to the storyteller that they have to know
an awful lot of stories. It's a reminder.
Let me illustrate. If you fire an arrow
and you hit a target dead center, to the casual observer that seems
an almost miraculous exercise of skill occurring instantaneously in real time. Of course it's nothing of the sort. It is the end product of a long,
diligent period of self preparation. When you look at the ways
in which Drut'sylas learned stories, without any recourse to writing
or written aids whatsoever, many of them couldn't write, Edith Marks could read
but most of the time she didn't, the Drut'syla,
over a 12-year training period, had to learn roughly
about one new story every day, with the occasional day off. So by the end of her training, she would,
without any kind of reading or writing, have memorized around 3,000-4,000 individual interlinked stories. Once she had all those stories, she had to be able
to go into the community, a busy, often oppressed community, undergoing the normal human difficulties
of bereavement, grief, disappointment, and she had to be able
to get exactly the right story for exactly the right occasion
on every single occasion. And the reason why the Rabbi of Dubno,
who had to do something rather similar, would resort to the image of shooting
an arrow to explain storytelling is because when you hear
somebody telling a story, the right story at the right time
in the right way, it seems to be an instantaneous
exercise of skill. But what's happening
is that first they learn the story - they shoot the arrow - and once the arrow is anchored
in the wall - in the memory - then all you have to do is recognize
and name the situation which surrounds it. Obvious meaning in context,
not an obvious meaning out of context. And the second meaning the story has
in the context of its tradition is that the first thing
the Drut'syla has to learn is not to judge situations
by their surface appearances. To see that things are not always
as they appear to the casual view. To see that a child who looks like
he's hitting a target with an arrow is in fact drawing the target
around the arrow afterwards. To realize possibilities that lie hidden,
sometimes in plain view. And as a result of 12 years
of explicitly learning this from the grandmother in the family circle, the Drut'sylas very often
seemed possessed of a presence of mind
and strength of character. The best illustration I can give of that
is to tell another story. For very obvious reasons,
one of the reasons why the Drut'syla tradition is not
as widespread now as it once it was is that a very large number of practicing
Jewish storytellers in Europe, along with many other
Jewish people in Europe, did not survive WWII, because they were victims
of the Holocaust. There are very few eyewitness accounts
that we've been able to locate of Drut'sylas - Jewish hereditary
female storytellers - practising in the camps. But we have got one story
from an eyewitness. From a man who was a Holocaust survivor,
and who as a teenager, scarcely more than a child in many ways, was in the habit of sitting in the camps
and listening to the storytelling of a Drut'syla who was practicing
along with her fellow internees. According to his account,
there was a particular guard in the camp who was known for his extreme
and unusual brutality and cruelty. And this guard happened to be walking by
as the storytelling session was in place. When he realized what was happening,
he walked over the yard, struck the storyteller to the ground
with the butt of his gun, and as she lay on the ground,
interrupted in her story, he leaned over and said, "When you people are all extinct,
who will remember your stories?" She looked up at him and said, "You will." And he had nothing to say to that. He walked away, and after that,
he left her alone. One thing that is not immediately obvious
about oral storytelling traditions if we think of them
in literate, educated terms, if we think of them
in terms of fairytales, is the extent to which they thrive and are
used in situations of extreme difficulty. The educated, literate gaze,
when it looks at an oral story, a folktale or a fairytale, very often sees something
simple, elemental, archetypal, I have, I'm sorry to say,
read the word "primitive" in a creative writing textbook
that was published far too recently, as something which in a sense exists and does not become interesting
as an achieved work of art until somebody else comes in
and gets to work on it and turns it into something
that it never was before. And that apparent simplicity,
I would say, as the example
of the Drut'sylas illustrates, is not something that actually
characterizes the story itself. It's not something
that we find in the story, it's something that we bring to the story. And one of the reasons
why we make that mistake, which I do believe to be a mistake, is because it is hard-wired
into the language that we use about stories and storytelling,
folktales and fairytales, we seem to airbrush
the storytellers right out of it. We seem to airbrush the original context
of the storytelling right out of it. Even the language
that we use to describe it is kind of guilty of this sin. We talk about Grimm's Fairytales. There are no Grimm's Fairytales. The Grimms didn't tell any fairytales. Calling those stories Grimm's Fairytales is a bit like calling the complete works
of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart "Ludwig von Köchel's Austrian Court Music
of the Age of the Enlightenment." And if Grimm's Fairytales were named
according to author rather than to editor, then they'd be called something like "The Folktales of Wild, Wild, Hassenpflug,
Hassenpflug, Viehmann and Others." And if they were called that,
we'd have a chance to wonder what Wild, Wild, Hassenpflug,
Hassenpflug, Viehmann and Others actually meant by the stories they told. We'd be able to look at the stories
in the context they originally existed, and we will be able to look
at the stories in their context, as I failed to do, inadvertently,
by taking the story of the arrow out of its context
in Jewish storytelling tradition and placing it in a different context
on the stage of a storytelling festival, where it could appear
as nothing other than a joke. Quite a good joke, but not a joke
which actually had a serious point. What I want to do, to leave you with
as a thought, if you like, is to suggest how much more we could learn if we were in the habit
of seeing those stories in the context in which
they originally existed. And one of the examples of that
is in a book that I read recently by anthropologist Edward Schieffelin, who spent 20 years working among
the Bosavi people of Papua New Guinea. One of the stories that he collected - they've been living sustainably
in the forest for many generations, and they had a story about how
hunting began in their part of the world. And the story was simply this: People and animals sat around
together waiting to eat, very near the beginning of the world, and they realized that there was no food. So one by one, all the animals
went off into the forest, and there they remained,
and the people went and hunted them. As they do to this day. Out of context, that story is so simple
that it's hardly worth telling. But Schieffelin points out that if you place it in the context
of the community in which it was told - he heard it in 1968, not long after
their first contact with Westerners, so they were still living the way
they'd done for generations - there are some very obvious implications. First of all, is that simply having humans and non-humans
sitting down together to share a meal is itself an image of the fact
that humans and non-humans are part of the same community,
part of the same system. And the good of one is the good of all. That's the way that life
was lived in those days. And the second implication is that
when the animals went into the forest and took the forms
in which we see them now, the forms which are different
from the forms we ourselves take, those differences are superficial. Underneath we are the same. And when you look at the kind of problems
that the world faces in the future, and when you consider
that here is a community which in 1968 had been living
sustainably for generations, it's no surprise
that a lot of the scholarship now, the anthropology and the dealing
with folktales and traditional cultures, is not about how we protect
those cultures from exploitation so much as, or at the same time
being about what we can learn from them for our own shared and common future. I don't know enough about that literature
to comment with any authority, but I do know a little bit about
the work that we've been doing to bring the tradition of the Drut'sylas
into play in the modern world. There's been a number of projects. I hate to quote statistics,
but I'm going to because they're simple, they give you an idea of what's happening. This was a Key Stage 2 writing project which Shonaleigh was leading up
as the storyteller, using the techniques
she learned from her grandmother as a Drut'syla in the 1970s and 80s. And in 2011, 60% of the pupils
on the writing project shot up two sublevels,
and 12.5% went up more than two sublevels. The following year, 2012, when the project had
bedded in a bit deeper, in the same KS2 writing project,
75% of pupils went up two sublevels, and 22% went up more than two sublevels. Those are remarkable
and conspicuous results, and they are corroborated
by the qualitative evidence that we've been collecting
from primary schools, teacher training, and undergraduate
courses that I've been running. That leads me to
a very specific conclusion. When we talk about the marginalization of oral storytelling
in traditional cultures, we tend to think of that
in terms of the damage that is done to the cultures themselves. If we neglect or marginalize African
cultures in discourses of literature, then it's natural, and very right
and proper, to be concerned about the negative effect that can have
on African experience and life. Equally, it is worth considering
how much is lost on the other side. If we neglect the oral storytelling
of the Drut'sylas and others like them, then obviously if we fail
to credit Dortchen Wild or other storytellers
who gave the Grimms their fairytales, that's obviously unfair
to Dortchen Wild and all the others. But also, how much are we forfeiting in terms of our
understanding of the story. Or to bring it back
to the question with which I started, how much more could we learn,
and how much richer and deeper would our experience of story be,
if we were able to see the arrows where they fall on the wall of the barn, and to teach ourselves
to be more accurate and consistent in the ways in which we draw
the targets around them. Because what I did when I told that story
and made a joke of it without meaning to was to notice the arrow where it fell,
learn the story and know it, but I had drawn the target
in the wrong place. So even though I'd shot the arrow, I hadn't shot the arrow
and missed the target, I'd shot the arrow and missed the arrow
by drawing the target in the wrong place. And until I actually thought about it, I didn't even realize I'd done it. How common is that mistake, and how much more
interesting could life be if we were better at avoiding it. Thank you very much. (Applause)
