ReViewing BlackMountain College 2024

Telling tales part 2.  Narrative Lives and Banned Stories

Themes in this post are, Narrative, stories, banned stories, the Magnificat, Rebel Irish songs, the Arab spring, so called ‘degenerate’ artists, Etty Hillesum diarist in hiding and Marshall Gregory’s ethical critique of narrative.

Stories are an integral part of our lives, from fairy tales to ancient Greek mythology and more localised folk tales, (Norton 1998, The Beast Within, comparing Celtic and Papua new Guinea mythologies.) In addition to stories we are told as children there are the stories we see on TV such as soap operas, also gaining popularity Netflix, the internet, social media and even adverts are mini stories, miniature narratives.

Gregory (2009) relates that in opposition to the story makers there are the story-deniers like the Puritans of the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Some narratives were banned because they were deemed too subversive. For instance the Magnificat (Lk 1:46-55), Rich Lusk (2008) states that it is the song of rebels and subversives, revolutionaries and insurgents.  It has been banned by monarchs in “Enlightenment” Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. In more recent history it was suppressed in Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s by petty dictators and in India by colonial viceroys. In Mary’s song she says “…he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly, the poor and hungry are filled with good things while the rich are turned away empty.” (Lk. 1:52). This is the kind of song-story that gives people hope, especially people who are enslaved, trafficked, starving, suppressed, laid low and bowed down by the power and greed of Governments, politics and Big Business corporations.

Banned narrative ‘Rebel’ songs from Ireland, in the past were disallowed in England because of their inflammatory subtext and folk songs using words of uprising such as, Sean South of Garryowen, Foggy Dew and Grace. Why are these stories so popular and so powerful? Terry Moylan author of The Reluctant Muse (2016) a commemorating the Easter Rising of 1916 which includes Irish Rebel songs and poetry from over a century ago. He speaks in self-depreciation when he says of rebel songs, ‘Really it is a means of making somebody feel better when they haven’t managed to achieve their political or military objectives; they take refuge in self-consolation musically.’ But he conciliates the view saying that whilst some narratives within the song-stories are politically motivated aiming to stir up partisan feeling, others are linked to the song-cycles and myths of ancient Ireland and again others are lyrical driven by a love of the home land. As with many narratives the origin and intention is hidden and euphemistic, Moylan muses that, “It’s not a single complexion that they all have, there’s variety in them.’ And goes on to recommend the value in the songs for their musicality or story-telling, without having to subscribe to any one faction or platform. Being in an Irish band myself, I can vouch for the strong feeling some of these song-stories stir up, usually resulting rowdy sing-alongs and frenetic dancing but all in good cheer.

The internet was a channel of story-telling in Egypt and Turkey during the Arab Spring in 2010/11 where Hemple (2016) tells us, there is no free press,  as such activists were able to alert and mobilise protest through social media sites such as  Facebook and Twitter. Now governmental clampdown has put a stop to all activities and is in turn using social media for its own uses, “You can now create a narrative saying a democracy activist was a traitor and a paedophile,” says Anne Applebaum, an author who directs a program on radical political and economic change at the Legatum Institute in London, (Hempel, 2016).

During WW2 certain all Modernist artists were designated ‘degenerate’ by the Third Reich, their story of being Jewish, being Gay, Gypsy-Roma, non-Arian – their visual story, was destroyed, stolen, sold or hidden from the public. Emile Nolde (German Danish Pinter) is a problematic practitioner, in that, the dualism of his narrative throw our allegiances powerfully for and equally determinedly against. As a supporter of the Nazis, his work is tainted and abhorrent by association, and yet it is redeemed and applauded by his outcast ‘degenerate’ demarcation. Over one thousand of his art works were removed from German museums and he was not allowed to paint, even in private. Despite the ban, a good story is irrepressible, legendary and subversive, and he made some of his best work during this period, which he hid, and swapped for food, or just gave away. He called them the "Unpainted Pictures". Nolde’s life, practice and choices are complex, like the best stories.  

Jewish WW2 diarist from Holland, Etty Hilsum, created narrative in hiding, in concentration camps and in secret. Her story persisted, enlarging and illuminating her life and the lives of us who read it historically. The banned stories, the banned people, the murdered people. Stories are a way of saying the unsayable. Hillesum a woman in her twenties, wrote of the philosophical, political and sexual life she was leading, the increasing restrictions her life and the lives of her friends and family were put under. Her narrative has a contemporary feel to it, independent young woman, just beginning to understand her role in the world. A writer and a thinker influenced by Freud and Rilke, her practice included letters, poems and diaries.

“Slowly but surely I have been soaking Rilke up these last few months: the man, his work and his life. And that is probably the only right way with literature, with study, with people or with anything else: to let it all soak in, to let it all mature slowly inside you until it has become a part of yourself. That, too, is a growing process. Everything is a growing process. And in between, emotions and sensations that strike you like lightning. But still the most important thing is the organic process of growing.” (Hillesum, in Smelik 2002)

In folk takes and mythology, crimes like rape and murder are ameliorated by the protagonist being superhuman god, or half animal hybrids, the transformations in Ovid (2009) point to the aftermath of crimes  and result in women transforming into trees and rivers to escape or to assuage offence against them (Norton 1998). Transformation is one of my favourite Narrative tropes. A psychologist friend of mine says that in helping unravel the layered and changing stories of patients, she often asks them what their favourite story was at the age of eight was. This is a telling game, for her it was The Magic Faraway Tree (Blyton 1943) a fantasy getaway, mine was The Cabbage Princess (Le Cain 1969), a story of transformation, punishment and ultimate relearning, reassessing and redemption. Ask yourself what yours was and then think how this story has effected your life.

Gregory (2009) talks specifically about the ethical implication of stories and this is an important and fascinating link. He quotes Vicram Chandra in this epithet, ‘The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world’. Gregory asserts that humanity is obsessed by stories, and our lives are saturated with stories. He believes that often repeated and well love stories can in time and perception change the narrative. Stories exert an influence ethically over us after we finish telling it or after we have closed the book, some stories have a persistent effect on us some stories are different when we revisit them at a different time.

A viewer’s perceptions of an art work, a diary, a piece of literature can change over time, the personal critical and ethical influence of narrative extends beyond the telling, Gregory (2009) sees it as an ongoing interaction. Real responses to the plight of fictional characters in Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Austen, Atwood or Bronte, the laughter and tears fictional characters produce evince in me,  Gregory (2009) recommends that we the audience are hungry for a more generous, compassionate, humane, thoughtful, connected, nourishing life through fiction, through narrative and story.

I recognise the proposition Gregory (2009) is offering so insightfully. His childhood adversary was an authoritarian Father Figure, mine was an autistic father with little empathy, emotional intelligence or verbal articulation, that piece of his emotional psyche was missing or damaged. I was a silent child, more watching and listening than speaking and interacting. I learned how to socially interact, finding silence was not acceptable to teachers or peers. My teacher was the TV, Saturdays afternoon Film Noir and soap operas of the 1970’s and 80’s. Some school texts such as Kes (Hines, 1968) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Sillitoe, 1958) and a lot of American sitcoms – Cheers, Fame, the Cosbys, Dynasty, Hammer Horror and Coronation Street. These shows gave me a social register of appropriate behaviours, albeit melodramatic which I echoed and repeated and reciprocated to my peers which they were greatly entertained by. In addition to this I became a bit of an amateur school girl anthropologist, observing the families of my school friends. I made it a mission to be invited to as many different houses as possible to spend the night, this I regarded as an essential part of my education.

Gregory (2009) stresses that we should not to dwell on petty paybacks for hurts of the past. The value of learning from narrative is an ethical imitation, an invitation to deepen our understanding of the past and the present and to acquire a different ethos from the victim persona I could have become (or was already becoming).A child of tyranny tends to respond too needily, too emphatically uncritically to any crumb of praise of support or sympathy, seeing a fictional relationship helps me ‘place’ a personal relationship, “as a an object to be apprehended and thought about, not just felt”, childish resentments and childish tendency to exaggerate and extend the extent and reach of the Father’s power and authority over me and others is only one ending to the story. My penchant for the transformative tale may not have me growing branches for arms but instead (more usefully) I have transformed my position in my own mind, and changed my stance about the past to accept, understand, let go and move on.

Brennan, M., (2016) Ireland’s Songs of Rebellion, https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/artsfilmtv/irelands-songs-of-rebellion-389291.html , accessed 1 April 2018.

Evans, M., (2014)  Etty Hillesum: an intellectual woman ahead of her time, Times Educational Supplement,

 https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/culture/etty-hillesum-an-intellectual-woman-ahead-of-her-time/2011570.article, accessed 2 April 2018.

Gregory, M., (2009) Shaped by Stories, the Ethical Power of Narratives, Indiana, University of Notre Dame.

Hempel, J., (2016) Social Media Made the Arab Spring but Could Not Save it, https://www.wired.com/2016/01/social-media-made-the-arab-spring-but-couldnt-save-it/, accessed 25 February 2018.

Hillesum, E., (1999) An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum. Preface by Eva Hoffman, London: Persephone Books.

Knubben, Thomas. Emil Nolde: Unpainted Pictures. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Kantz Publishers, 2000. 

Lusk, R., (2008) Mary’s Son, Mary’s Song: Implications of the Incarnation. http://trinity-pres.net/audio/08-12-07sermonnotes.pdf, accessed 1 Aril 2018.

Moylan, T, (2016) The Indignant Muse: Poetry and Songs of the Irish Revolution, Dublin, The Lilliput Press.

Myers, S., ed (2009) Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Gregory, H., London, Penguin, Signet Classics.

Norton, F., (1998) The Beast Within. MA thesis University of Cardiff Institute Cardiff.

Smelik, C. A. D., Ed. (2002) Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941–1943., translation by Arnold J. Pomerans. Ottawa, Ontario: Novalis Saint Paul University – William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Tate (2018a) Narrative, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/n/narrative, accessed 8^th February 2018.

Image: Emile Nolde, evening landscape, North Fresia, 1940’s – one of the ‘unpainted’ pictures.

Image: Magnificat, Icon of the Visitation, 14th-century wall painting of the Visitation from Timios Stavros Church in Pelendi, Cyprus.

Image: the crowd at a rebel song singalong, Dublin 1980s Derek Warfield.

Image: The Sea at Dusk, Emile Nolde, 1940s

Image: Etty Hillsum and her diaries

Image: cover of ‘the Cabbage Princess’ by Erol Le Cain 1969.

Image David Bradley in Ken Loache’s, Kes, 1969.