Story has elbowed out everything else, from the lyric to the logical argument, even the straightforward news dispatch. For the sake of comprehension and care, we must be spoken to in story. Story is our mother tongue, the argument runs. Among the other entities storytelling has recently been touted to save: wildlife, water, conservatism, your business, our streets, newspapers, medicine, the movies, San Francisco, and meaning itself. Storytelling is what will save the kingdom we are all Scheherazade now. Perhaps the most reliable marker is that little halo it has taken to holding above its own head, its insistent aura of piety. It is the realm of playful fantasy (but also the very mortar of identity and community) it traps (and liberates) it defines (and obscures). The narrator of “The Arabian Nights” must find herself bewildered at being name-checked in Karl Rove’s “Scheherazade Strategy,” as well as in articles about brand management, serialized content, mastering the attention economy-the unwitting inspiration, and occasional face, of the shifty and shifting tangle of alibis that goes by “storytelling.”ĭo we dare define it? “Storytelling”-as presently, promiscuously deployed-comprises fiction (but also nonfiction). But she has also been claimed by new constituencies and put to unsavory new uses. She is dusted off and wheeled out wherever the “magic of storytelling” is conjured, irresistible to any writer trafficking in “wonder” or “enchantment.” Her ghost floats through the work of Dave Eggers, Colum McCann, and Salman Rushdie in strenuous if harmless homage. Scheherazade has earned her rest, but she remains booked and busy, obsessively renamed and reclaimed. Who recalls that there was always a new baby in Scheherazade’s arms?
That’s to say nothing of the entirely forgotten three children she bore over those thousand and one nights. Nor was it enough to produce a series of nested stories under such deadlines (truly, I complain too much), stories so prickly and tantalizing that the king postponed her murder every night to wait for the next installment. It was not enough to be saddled with a husband who had the nasty habit of marrying and murdering a new virgin every day to assure himself of spousal fidelity. After a millennium, she remains the hardest-working woman in literature.
0 kommentar(er)
