The Secret Life of Stories
Jane Gleeson-White
March 11
Stories often have a life unto themselves – broken down, recast and built up again over the ages, such that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey can give rise to tales like James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Sheherazade’s epic struggle can live on in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. In the December edition of Meanjin, Jane Gleeson-White looks back at the power of storytelling from oral traditions to novels and cinema, and finds the intersections between works like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Faulkner and the documentary Lost in La Mancha. The full essay is now available on our editions page and you can read a short extract below.
Marie Cardinal’s novel The Words to Say It is one of literature’s starkest expressions of the power of words and stories. Published in France in 1975, The Words to Say It is the story of an ultimately triumphant odyssey through near-death and madness to life. Dedicated to ‘the doctor who helped me to be born’, Cardinal’s autobiographical novel recounts her birth and delivery from her mother—but not as we commonly understand birth and delivery, for the man who delivers her is not an obstetrician but a Freudian analyst, and the psychological birth he oversees is as physically demanding, traumatic and bloody as any physical birth.
In a seamless, spiralling narrative, Cardinal spins out her character’s experience: her psychological collapse so horrendously manifested in physical symptoms; her three years of unexplained haemorrhaging, which no drug nor doctor can cure; her regular thrice weekly visits to her analyst in a poorly lit cul-de-sac in Paris; her growing understanding that he can help her, despite her immense scepticism; and the flow of words that replaces her flow of blood and revives her sun-drenched, jasmine-scented childhood under the blue sky of Algeria.
The Words to Say It is an extraordinary story about a woman born into the constraints of middle-class, twentieth-century Western Europe; about mothers, inheritance and madness—and about the transformative power of words.
The doctor is not interested in her physical symptoms, her bleeding. He is interested only in her stories, her words. ‘Talk,’ he tells her, ‘say whatever comes into your head; try not to choose or reflect, or in any way compose your sentences. Everything is important, every word.’ Miraculously, without drugs, medical instruments or surgery, through words alone this doctor achieves what no other has been able to: her bleeding ceases immediately. And so begins her return to life, through the healing power of words and stories. As the narrator says, ‘Words were boxes, they contained material that was alive.’
As The Words to Say It so forcefully demonstrates, words and stories shape our lives—our individual lives and the life of the collective. Equally, the tales told by literature are themselves part of living traditions that date back to the beginning of recorded time. As I was writing this essay my head was full of bushfires, of burnt-out cars, ruined houses, death and devastation. I found it hard to turn my mind to the seemingly abstract subject of storytelling traditions until I realised the obvious: the Victorian bushfire tragedy and the human suffering it wreaked are directly related to my contention that we need stories—for their ability to give comfort to grieving hearts, to heal shattered lives and to reconnect broken communities. At the very least, stories help us to focus our random emotions and to articulate our feelings of helplessness as survivors or bystanders. They help us to understand.
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Comments
13 Mar 10 at 12:18
Re. 'At the very least, stories help us to focus our random emotions and to articulate our feelings of helplessness as survivors or bystanders. They help us to understand'. I reckon the whole blog phenomenon proves this point as well: people want to tell stories, people want to be heard, people want to read stories, they want to connect.
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