Tellers and Tales

Walter Benjamin observes that "storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and [that] this art is lost when the stories are no longer [remembered]. It is lost because there is no more weaving or spinning going on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself" (91). Benjamin emphasizes the close relationship between working, making, and telling—the crafting of a community as well as a tale. For him, stories give us a glimpse of the earliest cultures, the person actively shaping experience through living, authentic speech. Although there is undoubtedly truth in his account of the oral tale and the storyteller, it also reveals a longing for a past beyond recovery. Later in his work, Benjamin takes a less nostalgic view of the teller and tale, writing that "The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called 'Once upon a time'" (262).

The conflicting views Benjamin demonstrates regarding the meaning of stories and their performance presage the complex and contested perspectives focused on "the art of the story" in contemporary culture. For many literary academics, storytelling in its many structural forms, from the sacred to the secular, is heralded as the quintessential human activity, one that defies death while imposing meaning and order on experience. Others, alert to the way stories may reify the ideological and commercial interests of those in power, are wary of the promise, of the wish come true. In popular literature as well, stories and storytelling are recommended as valuable self-help and spiritual aids—but only particular kinds of stories with particular virtuous or therapeutic aims are sanctioned. Three recent books about stories, each with varying definitions and perspectives on performance, offer different understandings of the work of story in the cultures that shape us: the realm of dream; the school setting; and that factory of stories and storytellers, the family.

With the publication of Creative Storytelling: Building Community and Changing Lives, Jack Zipes expands his interest in Marxist and feminist interpretation of tales into the field of critical pedagogy (an area of study often associated with the work of Henry Giroux). Not that Zipes is a newcomer; his twenty years of work with children, educators, and storytellers in the United States and England are documented in the storytelling exercises, suggestions for classroom approaches, and "theoretical reflections" that compose this book. Although Zipes characterizes the book as "an anti-manual, not to instruct but to share . . . methods and ideas . . . borrowed from many different critics, storytellers, teachers and children," the practical instructions for integrating stories with visual art activities and creative dramatics would be useful for teachers of children and youth as well as the teachers of would-be teachers in colleges and universities (2). His chapters provide familiar and unfamiliar stories for classroom use, as well as interesting variants on the tales that might prove time-consuming for the teacher to collect; the assignments themselves are detailed and supplemented with helpful material such as the structural functions and motifs in the fairy and folk tale and critical commentary on the various genres. The book progresses from performative approaches to familiar fairy tales to forms including "utopian tales" and science fiction. And most admirable of all, Zipes never patronizes his intended reader—the teacher with limited time and resources—who daily struggles to impart literacy and empower children.

As critical pedagogy, Zipes's classroom work is but a means to implement a more ideological project in which "story" is the vehicle by which "we become our own narrators, the storytellers of our lives, . . . to put...