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| C.S. Lewis and Martin Buber the true art of storytelling by Tam Zelig Once in a time yet to come a disciple of the Baal Sipur Tov wanted to begin his time as a storyteller. When he went to Baal Sipur Tov to tell him and to ask his blessing, Baal Sipur Tov told him that he should begin telling stories and that when the time was right he would give his blessing. So the disciple began to tell stories. At first there were only very small groups who would come, but gradually as the disciple’s talents grew, more and more came to hear him. And as the crowds grew the disciple said to himself, surely now Baal Sipur Tov will give me his blessing, so he went to him. But Baal Sipur Tov said that it was not yet time, he still had much to learn. So the disciple returned to his storytelling and his fame grew, and as he told his stories his audiences were more and more caught up in the emotions of the story, and it was not uncommon for even the hardest among them to be moved to tears or laughter, sadness or great joy, and the disciple thought surely now Baal Sipur Tov will give me his blessing. But he was told the same message as before, so he continued to tell his stories until one day he arrived very shaken in front of Baal Sipur Tov. He made the startling announcement that he felt he would have to quit storytelling. When asked why he explained that the last time he told a story he began to see himself between two worlds, one was the world of the audience and one was the world of the story, and he felt that if he wasn’t very careful he could just as easily end up in the story world as in this world. At that Baal Sipur Tov laughed with joy and gave his blessing to the disciple whose fame continues to grow. This story illustrates the power of the storyteller to bring an audience as well as himself into an alternate world, transcending space and time. Martin Buber attributes this quality of transcendence to the form of dialogic communication he calls I-You. I- You communication is more than simply conversation between two people; when I-You communication occurs, the parties connect in true understanding--not necessarily accord, which is a very important point and one that we will come back to later. But real understanding is difficult to achieve unless the communicators are listening, concerned with, connected with one another. And all too often in our world where much communication of important ideas and concepts takes place in writing, there is no opportunity for the parties, in this case reader and writer, to connect, to go beyond the mere words into emotion and imagination. But storytelling, with its quality of transcending space and time, can be the conduit of connection. This makes storytelling the ideal form for I-You communication even on a printed page. To illustrate the point, we will look at the work of two authors, Martin Buber and C.S. Lewis. Both authors were respected scholars and master storytellers. And both were able to truly engage in I-You dialogue with the people they spoke to, so it only fair to see how effectively they transferred this quality to their writings. First, we will look at their intentional stories, and then see if they apply any of the same emotional quality to their “academic” writings. According to Martin Buber, dialogue must be the basis of effective human relationship. He further discusses that this relationship takes place on three levels or spheres: “The first: life with nature . . . .The second: life with men . . . . The third: life with spiritual beings” (Buber 1970, 56-57). When people are face to face, I-You communication is quite possible. But much communication in our modern world takes place long distance in which pronouncements from a writer make their way to a reader. I am not talking about the I-It communication of newspapers or magazines. These are intended to inform readers of events and facts, and whether or not they are effective or even desirable is not the issue here. Rather, I am talking about communications intended to share ideas, and which, in a face-to-face encounter would automatically generate response. Now, even with the advantage of storytelling, it is quite clear that writing is not the ideal way to communicate and certainly not to create and maintain relationship between people. As Harold Stahmer notes, “Few moderns realize that the art of writing was at first nothing more than a means of keeping trading records . . .” (Stahmer 1968, 4). Perhaps we would all be better off if writing had never progressed further. However, the intention of this paper is not to argue for the elimination of writing, however tempting that might be. My intention is to show that, given our world situation where we too often beggar ourselves of relationship, the most effective way to stir emotions and create response is the I-You form of written dialogue as demonstrated by two great storytellers C.S. Lewis and Martin Buber. Martin Buber’s place as a storyteller was secured not from his own stories, but by the retelling of Hasidic stories. But it is the power of these stories that enabled Buber to recognize many of the other great truths which he wrote about such as dialogic communication. Speaking of this influence Buber said, “‘I bore in me the blood and the spirit of those who created it [Hasidism], and out of my blood and spirit it has become new’” (Buber 1969, 63). Storytelling seems to be an activity as old as humans, intrinsic to human behavior. The neolithic cave paintings, though not spoken words, imply this storytelling impulse. Stories were used to make sense of what didn’t make sense, as in the Sumerian story of Gilgamesh which deals with why we die and includes an earlier story, the flood story, concerned with explaining a widespread cataclysm. Stories also teach right action and warn against wrong action, as in Homer’s stories of the Trojan war. Both examples are very old, as we compute history, but both as we know them come to us only in written form. The spoken forms were much older. Now, clearly, spoken stories told to an audience establish a dialogue between teller and hearers. Anyone who has acted in a play knows how this works. When the audience is non-responsive, resistant to the emotions the actor projects, whether these be sad or happy, serene or stormy, then the actor must adjust the way that he/she is performing to attempt to communicate the story--and one-way communication, even with an audience, is not really communication at all. In this case, the actor simply functions mechanically, like a television set--reporting the story. But when the audience responds, and sometimes this is merely an electric feeling in the air, inspiration flows from actor to audience and back again, noticeably enhancing the performance. This is I-You communication--a dialogue--though admittedly a non-traditional one. Even though the words spoken by the actor are memorized, prescribed, I-You communication subtly changes the work, building the story, adding new dimensions of meaning not dreamed of by even the author. Aha, you’ll say, this is where the analogy breaks down, and with it, the argument. Live storytelling and plays are all very well, but written words cannot induce the circle of communication. They are one-way. The written story falls far short of I-You dialogue. The physical reality of reading irrevocably divorces the writer from the reader. There may be some emotion elicited by the story, but it can necessarily only be a truncated sort of emotion, one with no outlet except in the mind of the reader, and therefore unable to fulfill the circular requirement of any dialogue, let alone I-You dialogue with its greater demands on both parties. Not at all. The true goal of the storyteller is not to tell a story about some one or some thing else, but rather for the teller’s I to bring the audience’s You into the story. This is valid communication, and it works on the page as well as in person. Or, as Howard Polsky and Yaella Wozner put it in Everyday Miracles: The Healing Wisdom of Hasidic Stories, “The storyteller knows the cues that signal the reader to go inside himself rather than to seek the what, who, when, and where, which are found in a good newspaper article” (Polsky and Wozner 1989, 469). If I, in my solitary room, read a piece that paints such a clear picture, tells a story, that I quite understand what the writer is doing, then we are communicating. But some analysis is called for to prove the point. In Eclipse of God Buber introduces his thesis of the relation between religion and philosophy by telling the story of two talks. The talks illustrate how I-You dialogue appears to work and how it really works. For the sake of brevity, we will concern ourselves only with the first talk. The first talk occurred with a group of workers who had come to listen to three days of lecture on the topic “Religion as Reality.” Buber explains, “What I meant by that was the simple thesis that ‘faith’ is not a feeling in the soul of man but an entrance into reality, an entrance into the whole reality without reduction and curtailment” (Buber 1988, 3). Notice that, although he is explaining a profound abstract, Buber uses the simple storytelling device of the first person singular to draw the reader in. One word is also italicized placing emphasis where the author would speak with emphasis. In other words the pattern of written words approaches a spoken pattern. (We shall see later when we discuss C. S. Lewis whether or not this technique entirely works. ) Buber singles out one particular man: “Among the workers was one, a man no longer young, whom I was drawn to look at again and again because he listened as one who really wished to hear.” Buber takes the time to develop the old man’s character as a storyteller would. To merely understand his point it isn’t necessary to know that the man was “no longer young,” that he was a good listener, or that he had, as Buber says later, “a curious face . . .[like ] an old Flemish altar picture . . . .” (Buber 1988, 4). But the reader enters the world of the story by knowing the details, and entering the world of the story enables the reader to understand the teller’s I. As a reader, I know that listening and faces are important to Buber, that he draws inspiration from such small details and that he also notices art, measuring it against like. Buber goes on to tell how the old man finally speaks creating a dialogue which the readers hear because we so clearly see the man. We have a clear picture of the event which occurred in a different space and time because of the use of I-You which transcends space and time. But although there is dialogue between Buber and the old man, there is not complete accord. When the old man speaks it is to disagree, to say that he has no need of Buber’s thesis. “I have had the experience, . . . that I do not need this hypothesis ‘God’ in order to be quite at home in the world” (Buber 1988, 4). The brief speech of the man struck me; I felt myself more deeply challenged than by the others. Up till then we had certainly debated very seriously, but in a somewhat relaxed way; now everything had suddenly become severe and hard. How should I reply to the man? (Buber 1988, 4) Buber reminds us that he is relating a dialogue: his own feelings are important to the story and the understanding of the reader. He also describes the atmosphere of the room--the effect his exchange with the old man has on all the parties to the discussion. Each careful detail is an element that good storytellers use to allow the hearers to see and thus experience the story world. But now, Buber shifts focus away from the scene and into his own mind: “It came to me that I must shatter the security of his Weltanschauung, [world view] through which he thought of a ‘world’ in which one ‘felt at home’” (Buber 1988, 5). We question Buber’s response--in the interest of his thesis, he chooses to destroy a part of the old man’s world. To one who shrinks from hurting others, in a time when most respond to conflicting viewpoints with a shrugged, “Everyone believes their own way,” Buber’s willingness to defend his perceived right seems callous, even arrogant. But this response, too, is communicating with the story. Even Buber understands that what he has done is questionable, for instead of returning to dialogue and reporting word for word what was said, Buber condenses his response to the man into a sort of stream-of- consciousness dialogue that the reader can take personally--Buber is talking to him, asking and answering the questions that are quite likely in a reader’s mind, though they are specifically the questions elicited in Buber by his conversation with the old man: “What sort of a world was it? What we were accustomed to call world was the ‘world of the senses,’ the world in which there exists vermillion and grass green, C major and B minor, the taste of apple and of wormwood.” As the words come, I see the colors, hear music, taste a crisp Macintosh on my tongue, and at the same time, I understand that these are illustrations meant to carry me across the abstract difficulties which this reported conversation was about. “Was this world anything other than the meeting of our own senses with those unapproachable events about whose essential definition physics always troubles itself in vain?” Here he reduces perception to an irreducible scientific reality, while also expressing the essential absurdity of the scientific urge to know. This nuanced subtlety would likely be lost on most listeners, and so we see a place where the written word can communicate the idea more efficiently than the fleeting spoken word. When he continues, he repeats the color images, and the reader is once more reassured by manageable sensory language. “The red that we saw was neither there in the ‘things,’ nor here in the ‘soul.’ It at times flamed up and glowed just so long as a red-perceiving eye and a red-engendering “oscillation” found themselves over against each other. Where then was the world and its security? The unknown “objects” there, the apparently so well-known and yet not graspable “subjects” here, and the actual and still so evanescent meeting of both, the “phenomena”-- was that not already three worlds which could no longer be comprehended from one alone? How could we in our thinking place together these worlds so divorced from one another? What was the being that gave this “world,” which had become so questionable, its foundation?” [Merely good writing, you say. Well, yes, but this is a circular argument, for good writing is good insofar as it achieves I-You communication, eliciting emotional responses and therefore, understanding, from the readers.] What Buber does here in The Eclipse of God is illustrate a difficult concept with a story. C.S. Lewis does the same thing in Mere Christianity. In trying to explain the law of human nature, a rather complicated thesis, Lewis uses storytelling techniques. “The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not.” The tone is conversational, comfortable, and the language is common and approachable. Now this [behavior] is really so peculiar that one is tempted to try to explain it away. For instance, we might try to make out that when you say a man ought not to act as he does, you only mean the same as when you say that a stone is the wrong shape; namely, that what he is doing happens to beinconvenient to you. But that is simply untrue. A man occupying the corner seat in the train because he got there first, and a man who slipped into it while my back was turned and removed my bag are both equally inconvenient. But I blame the second man and do not blame the first. (Lewis 1952, 28) There are fewer sensory details here than in the example from Buber, but the pictorial elements are the same. And Lewis uses another storytelling device that we have not mentioned before--he begins a number of sentences with conjunctions, a technique much favored in fairy tales and much decried by K-12 English teachers who miss the point entirely. The result of such language and such illustration, however, is that the reader sees the picture and feels comfortable with the writer, and on the basis of this comfort, the reader is prepared to listen and respond to what the writer has to say. Writing should be gentle on the reader, even when the topic is tough or the goal is to get the reader thinking about that which he doesn’t wish to think. It should engage the reader lovingly in I-You dialogue. Now, in both of the previous examples, we have examined Buber and Lewis in the act of communicating with a general audience. It also happens that both examples were originally presented orally: Buber’s were lectures, and Lewis gave his as radio programs. We spoke earlier about the use of linguistic devices by the storyteller using the medium of writing to approximate speech patterns. While this is a good technique, it can sometimes be taken too far and have the opposite of the desired effect. Lewis relates an incident where he discovered this in his preface to the second edition of Mere Christianity. A “talk” on the radio should, I think, be as like real talk as possible, and should not sound like an essay being read aloud. In my talks I had therefore used all the contractions and colloquialisms I ordinarily use in conversations. In the printed version I reproduced this . . . . And wherever , in the talks, I had made the importance of the word clear by the emphasis of my voice, I printed it in italics. I am now inclined to think that this was a mistake--an undesirable hybrid between the art of speaking and the art of writing . . . .He [the writer] has his own, different means of bringing out the key words and ought to use them. (Lewis 1952, 5) So, as I mentioned earlier, writing has its limitations, and as much as it should strive to reproduce I-You dialogic communication it will always fall short. But a skillful writer-storyteller can come very close. That the I-You dialogue survives such writing may merely reflect the desire of two good writers to appear to converse with their readers. But what happens when we turn to their academic writing, the pieces produced for a more “sophisticated” and certainly more specialized audience? In this section from his book Between Man and Man, Buber refutes Kierkegaard’s contention that the only I-You relationship possible is between man and God, not between man and man. Kierkegaard behaves in our sight like a schizophrenist, who tries to win over the beloved individual into “his” world as if it were the true one. But it is not the true one. We, ourselves wandering on the narrow ridge, must not shrink from the sight of the jutting rock on which he stands over the abyss; nor may we step on it. We have much to learn from him, but not the final lesson. (Buber 1965, 55) We shall look at the storytelling elements in a moment. First, I want to interpret the passage, for the act of interpretation is significantly part of I-You communication--the dialogue which joins two people together. What Buber seems to be saying with his imagery is that Kierkegaard is not falling into the abyss, but is standing over it on a rock that will only support him. He cannot or will not acknowledge the rest of us who are passing by on the narrow ridge for if any were to go to him on that “jutting rock” they and he would fall into the abyss. We can, however, acknowledge him as the solitary one, and from time to time we may also and should also separate ourselves on these precipices, but we must not stay there ignoring the path that takes us out of the abyss. The idea of using imagery to help explain or support a difficult position is, of course, a storytelling technique, but what it does is force the reader to now become immersed in the image, to not only see it, but to be there and experience it, once again bringing the “you” into the writer’s “I.” Another element that storytelling adds to communication is that it often unites Buber’s three spheres of relationship involved in I-You communication alluded to earlier: man, nature, and spiritual. In the passage above, we have a perfect example of this relationship. Here we see man and nature in the form of the precipice and the rocky path and the abyss which definitely has spiritual connotations. Also Buber urges us not only to see the man on the precipice, but the precipice itself clearly defining that we have a relationship not only to the man, but the rock as well. Our rejection can be supported by Kierkegaard’s own teaching. He describes “the ethical” as “the only means by which God communicates ‘man’” (1853). The context of the teaching naturally keeps at a distance the danger of understanding this in the sense of an absolutizing of the ethical. . . . so that as the ethical cannot be freed from the religious neither can the religious from the ethical without ceasing to do justice to the present truth. (Buber 1965, 55,56) Using first person plural pronouns also helps to include writer and audience in the same world. Now let’s look at C.S. Lewis from his book Allegory Of Love: A study in Medeival Tradition. Lewis establishes at the very beginning the difficulty and lack of interest that the modern reader might show to this subject, but he soon dispels our reticence with all the skills of a storyteller by drawing us into his world: The study of this whole tradition may seem, at first sight, to be but one more example of that itch for “revival,” that refusal to leave any corpse ungalvanized, which is among the more distressing accidents of scholarship. Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been in some sort we are still. (Lewis 1959, 1) Here again we see the use of the personal pronouns, the short sentences, the wonderful imagery. Even to those not really interested in the stuff of “old dead white guys” there is a drawing in that encourages us to read on. Here is a “friend,” not an academician trying to tell an interesting story that could have an effect on our lives. The image, although slightly dated for today’s audience helps us to see more clearly why we might object to this “itch for ‘revival.’” We have seen time as passing like a train. If we are on board, we are leaving past stops behind unable to return to them, so why bother thinking about them; but Lewis says that that is not an accurate picture. Time and living are alive, and they leave nothing behind. This image also connects us to nature as, for most of us who have ever taken long train rides know, we spend a good deal of the time watching the passing scenery. With this introduction Lewis then takes us on a journey through time as he reconstructs the historical and emotional “trainstops” along the way, and throughout, he constantly endeavors to bring us into this world. I have sat through lectures on this same subject which endeavored only to kill time, not make it come alive, but the power of I-You communication is that if done properly it can prove to be the greatest form of teaching, whether written or oral. In The Legend of the Baal-Shem, Martin Buber tells the story of the great storyteller. As we look at this story we’ll see Buber’s and Hasidism’s definition of what makes a storyteller and the story so unique. Once the Baal-Shem came to a city. It was very early in the morning, and hardly anyone was stirring. But a servant, going about his business, met the Baal-Shem, who engaged him in conversation. However, as the man answered the Baal-Shem only “briefly and shyly,” the Baal-Shem “fell into narrating a story.” Soon others joined him to listen to the narration. His narration, however, was so intertwined that whenever someone came up it seemed to that person to be at the beginning, and those who earlier had not been curious were now entirely concentrating on what would happen next and awaited it as if it were the fulfillment of their most precious hopes. (Buber 1969, 150-151) The story, therefore, is a bridge, a way to communicate when ordinary conversation is thwarted by diffidence or shyness or awe. A writer can use story in the same way to traverse a difficult space in the work. Instead of abstractions and words piled on words, one can tell a story and tell it in such a way that it draws even the reluctant readers into it as we saw with Lewis. Thus they all had one great story, and within it each had his own small and all-important story. The small stories intercrossed and clasped one another, but in an instant they were again disentangled and in order and ran along parallel to one another, very neat and proper. (Buber 1969, 151) There is a sense in any great story that it contains many smaller stories and that each one is written exclusively for the reader. As the story continues to explain: But the narration of the Baal-Shem was not like your narrations, children of the present, which are twisted like a little human destiny or round like a little human thought. Rather the vari-coloured magic of the sea was in them and the white magic of the stars and, most ineffable of all, the soft wonder of the infinite air. (Buber 1969, 152) A great story does not need to make its purpose clear with dragged out morals or explanations. There, quite rightly, may be an element of mystery and interpretation about it, although a great story must be relevant to the reader or hearer: And yet it was no report of distant times and places that the story told; rather, under the touch of its words, the secret melody of each person was awakened, the ruined melody which had been presumed dead, and each received the message of his dispersed life, that it was still there and anxious for him. It spoke to each, to him alone, there was no other; he was everyone, he was the tale. (Buber 1969, 152) As we have seen in each example presented, a good story draws people in. We, the readers, are as fascinated with the tale and the technique of the Baal Shem Tov as are the people listening in the village square. “The storyteller’s job is to make something real that has a lot missing and makes an impact only by the listener’s filling in the pieces from his subjective life situation, thereby making that story part of him and his subjective reality” (Polsky and Wozner 1989, 469). The problem, then, with most academic writing or indeed most writing is that it is based on I-It communication rather than on I- You. What that means for the reader is a sense of alienation. Education and learning should be more like a Greek schola, a place of leisure. For the Greeks this meant one teacher with his pupils gathered around him, avidly listening to and arguing with each other. In the modern world the classroom is much enlarged, and a textbook replaces the give and take of the schola. As I have tried to show, however, even textbooks could be written in such a way as to promote intellectual, emotional give and take--dialogue--by liberally using Buber’s I-You dialogic communication techniques. Imagine a biology text filled with story, or even a math text. It is possible, desirable, perhaps essential in order to once again reclaim the joy of learning, growing, and becoming too often missing in the modern classroom and in the world. It is such a world that Martin Buber and C. S. Lewis and others of their kind have hoped for, dreamed of, and told stories of. |