The Story Is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories

7. Commanding the Story

7 Commanding the Story When storytellers are telling stories, they’re active, fit for description: they’re talking, fluttering their hands, moving about. Their listeners aren’t so easy. With few exceptions, a storyteller can get to them only after the narrative moment is over, by which point they are themselves telling a story about an event in which they were among the listeners. But there is no story—told, written, filmed, sung, or otherwise performed—without story listening, seeing, or reading. Every fiction writer, alone in a room, posits a reader or hearer. That, as Primo Levi says, is part of the fiction writer’s art: the ability to tell a story and to imagine a responsive listener who is not there.1 Another part is imagining the response of the listener who is there, making the act of storytelling part of the story being told. No surprise in this: storytellers in any medium are aware of story listeners . Primo Levi’s lines on the fiction writer’s art are from a novel with two characters: the first-person narrator, who is a listener, and the talkaholic mechanic, to whom that narrator listens. Homer used that narrative relationship in the Iliad, as did Mary Shelley in Frankenstein , Dashiell Hammett in The Maltese Falcon, and William 90 Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom!, each of them in a different way and to a different end. Iliad: The Worst Storyteller in Homer The Odyssey’s Homer loves storytellers. Odysseus has a different identity and different story for nearly every person he meets. The four books he spends in Phaeacia, telling Arete and Alcinous about his marvelous adventures, is perhaps the most fabulous first-person narrative of antiquity. In book 1, Mentes (really Athena in disguise) tells Telemachus that years ago Odysseus visited his father, the king of the Taphians, to get poison for his arrows. Nestor and Menelaus tell Telemachus about their adventures getting home, Helen tells the story of the Trojan Horse, Penelope tells Odysseus the story of how she kept the suitors at bay by weaving and unweaving the shroud for Laertes, Odysseus’ father. Even the dead tell stories: Agamemnon tells Odysseus the story of his own death, and Amphimedon, one of the dead suitors, tells Agamemnon the story of Penelope’s weaving trick and the battle with Odysseus and Telemachus. There are more. The stories told in the Odyssey are informational and instrumental . Some are told to get people to act: Odysseus’s long tale, for example, is told to convince Arete to provide him a ship with which to get home, and Athena/Mentes’ story of Odysseus’s early travel is told to prod Telemachus to go off on his own journey. Some are informational for us as much as for the characters: Agamemnon telling Odysseus about his murder and Menelaus telling Telemachus about his encounter with the Old Man of the Sea. And some are ostensibly told for entertainment but become important plot elements: the performance of the Phaeacian minstrel Demodocus moves Odysseus to tears and sets the stage for his own narrative. But Homer’s other great epic, the Iliad, has only one storyteller: Phoenix, an old man who appears in the second part of book 9. He appears nowhere else in Homer, and he is never mentioned by any other character. Phoenix tells two stories, one about himself and the other about Meleager. He tells the stories to convince Achilles to Commanding the Story 91 return to the fighting. Unfortunately, he tells the stories so badly the results are exactly the opposite of what he intended. The Iliad begins and ends with a ransom—for the living daughter of the priest Chryses in the first book and the dead son of the King Priam in the twenty-fourth. In the course of that first exchange, Agamemnon , leader of the Argive forces, ignites the wrath of Achilles. A plague has afflicted the Argive camp, and Agamemnon has no idea what to do. Achilles, the best of the Argive fighters, asks the seer Calchas what’s wrong. Calchas says the plague is the result of Agamemnon ’s refusal to accept Chryses’ offer of ransom for his daughter, Chryseis. In a rage, Agamemnon accuses Calchas of always giving him bad news. He insults Achilles for asking Calchas’s advice, and then says he’ll return Chryseis to her father. If he’s going to lose a female...