"The Storyteller": Narrative Authority and Cultural Nationalism in Brendan Behan's Short Fiction

"The Storyteller": Narrative Authority and Cultural Nationalism in Brendan Behan's Short Fiction }ohn Brannigan More renowned for his plays, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, and his fictional autobiography, Borstal Boy, Brendan Behan's earliest publications were short stories. The argument of this essay is that Behan's stories reflect the thematic concerns and stylistic tendencies of nationalist short story writing, but that increasingly the stories become stories about storytelling , about the formal exercise of narrative authority. Read in this way, as considerations of the power and performance of narrative, Behan's stories reveal themselves to be more than thinly masked autobiographical sketches, but also multi-layered reflexive narratives, more interested in style than plot. Before he abandoned the short story form, Behan used the form to reflect on the persuasive and, more specifically, seductive power of storytelling, and thus began to consider the properties which rendered narrative such a potent tool of political and cultural nationalism. "The storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale" (Benjamin 87). Walter Benjamin argues that the figure of the storyteller embodies the social rituals of legitimation and conferral, drawing authority from his capacity to relate stories to others, while simultaneously passing on the power of narrative to his listeners. JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 31.3 (Fall 2001): 283-298. Copyright © 2001 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 284 JNT Accordingly, as Ross Chambers has pointed out, the storyteller cedes his authority even as he exercises it, for in the act of disclosing his narrative "secret" or germ, he ceases to possess and control its dissemination (Story 50-1). The storyteller is, thus, in classic Barthesian terms, the author of his own disappearance, which Benjamin acknowledges in the conclusion to his essay when he writes that the storyteller "is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story" (107). The basis both for the social significance of the storyteller and of his dissolution in the act of telling is the infinite iterability of the story. "Storytelling ," Benjamin writes, "is always the art of repeating stories" (90). As such, it is at once both conservative and transitory, evoking the notion of a tradition in which stories are authorized and reproduced, and of their momentary value and consumption, usually for the purposes either of entertainment or education. For Benjamin, storytelling was an artisan craft of direct communication, in which the teller fashioned the "raw material of experience" into something "solid, useful" (107). In contrast to the totalizing speculation of the novel, stories were the vehicles of a kind of folk wisdom, and storytellers were akin to "teachers and sages," with "counsel " to offer the many (107). The authority of the storyteller is thus derived from the form itself, conferred upon the storyteller by his listeners in anticipation of a useful or gratifying narrative of experience or wisdom, the narrative itself in turn extending the compass of the listeners' own repertoire of stories. The act of storytelling which Benjamin describes acquired considerable symbolic significance in the Irish revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in both oral and written forms. It served as a model form of continuity and authority in which nationalist myths of tradition and legitimacy were both mirrored and disseminated. In the nationalist imagination of the late nineteenth century, storytelling figured both the intimacy of the national community and the endurance of dissident popular cultural forms. The movement to preserve, collect, revise, and popularize Irish folk tales in written form led in turn to the emergence of storytelling as a powerful trope of authority and conferral in literary nationalism . The recurrent nationalist motifs of popular folk tales, which functioned to delineate and define distinguishing characteristics of Irish culture, found a new form in the development of the Irish short story form. The Storyteller 285 Benjamin argues that the short story is a reductive manifestation of the oral story form, "which no longer permits that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers which...