The Poem in the Story: Music, Poetry, and Narrative

Prelude

Prelude The aesthetic attitude is that offeeling embodied in "form." - Bernard Bosanquet, Three Lectures on Aesthetic15 Storytelling involves more than a linear movement from conflict to resolution . It does include that linear movement-necessarily, for there can be no story without it. But what makes a story artistically engaging and emotionally evocative is the poem in the story. Every story has such a poem: at its heart, a metaphorical center that is alive and compelling. In the end, it is not the explicit shallow maxim that is the significant and memorable aspect ofstory: meaning is more complex, more lyrical. All parts ofthe story rhythmically move the members of the audience-whether that audience be responding to an oral or a literary narrative-to that molten nave where the emotions evoked by the images that have been craftily, guilefully devised by the storyteller are arranged, organized, and worked into vessels of form. It is those formal experiences, alive with contained emotions of members of the audience, that are the reason audiences keep coming back to story. Dance is a part of storytelling, music is the essence of storytelling: it is not possible to divorce stories and their tellers from dances and their dancers , from music and its musicians. There is a melodic line in storytelling that is memorable, suspenseful, and that effectively claims the attention of the members of the audience. But there is something more, another kind of rhythm, a pulse that subverts the melodic line, incorporating it as it simultaneously fragments it, then reorganizing it into a more intricate set of sounds composed ofwords, but going beyond the lexical, denotative content of those words. It touches an audience not in the intellect but the imagination. It is forged ofemotions that take thought and recreate it into a textured experience, the weave shaped by words, yes, but more importantly composed of the feelings evoked by those words and of the images that they cast. Story is composed of words, of images, of feelings, of rhythm: all of 3 4 Harold Scheub these conspire to create the metaphorical yeastiness that is the poem in the story. This, then, is the argument ... Images are the raw material of the story. They are drawn from two sources, the contemporary world which produces realistic images, and the ancient tradition from which fantasy mythic images are taken. The storyteller brings these two kinds of imagery into relationship during a story performance. They have the effect ofevoking emotions from members of the audience, feelings of familiarity from the contemporary images and a wide range ofemotions from the ancient tradition. When the storyteller, using rhythmical patterning, unites these two kinds ofimagery, metaphor is created. This is the music ofthe story. Complexities are discovered in the two lines that stream through the performance . One ofthose is the surface narrative, the melodic line, the ordering of the contemporary and mythic images in a linear cause and effect movement to a resolution. The other is the rhythm of the story, the complex patterning that has the effect of subverting the melodic line without obscuring it, and thereby leading the story, and the audience, into new layers ofexperience. The meaning or message becomes more intricate than the obvious surface homilies revealed by the melodic line, as the storyteller moves the audience into a more profound experience of the linkage between their contemporary lives and the worlds of the ancient tradition. There is a transformation; characters move through transitional experiences on the linear surface, a kind of rite of passage, as the audience simultaneously engages in the transformation emotionally. Storytelling is ritual. The ultimate meaning of the story is essentially emotional, as the varied feelings of the members of the audience are worked into new forms that, for the duration of the performance, have the added effect of welding the audience into a unity. The story becomes a ritualistic experience, the objective of which is to move the members of the audience into that metaphorical center, into the poem in the story. POSHOLI'S STORY Posholi (c. 1795-1868) was a brother of the Sotho king, Moshoeshoe (c. 1786-1870), a leader who struggled against the Afrikaners and against The Poem in the Story 5 other African peoples, especially the Thembu.16 In 1820, Moshoeshoe settled at the foot of Botha-Bothe Mountain at a time when Shaka, the ambitious leader of the Zulu, was expanding his kingdom. Fleeing the...