Telling stories

I have spent the semester with my Bible and Literature class reading a variety of literary works that interpret scripture and use their interpretations to tell a “story.” Right now, we’re reading a book by the novelist Norman Mailer titled The Gospel According to the Son. It purports to be the New Testament story told from the perspective of someone whose view we do not have: Jesus of Nazareth.

When the book was published, Mailer’s approach received very different responses. Some thought it was interesting and very honest; others considered him to have done something audacious, claiming to climb inside Jesus’ head and tell readers what he was thinking as he wandered the Galilean countryside.

Telling the story of anyone else is always a difficult if not dangerous proposition. We like to think of the exercise in terms of accuracy: are we really reporting the facts correctly? But I think it is more an act of the imagination. We have to imagine ourselves in the shoes of another and string together the bits of information we have or the glimpses we get into other lives. There is always a story embedded in what we produce, even if it is not more than a dispassionate, chronological listing of names and dates. Who among us can look at such a bare list and not imagine almost immediately a connection between those dots?

There is great risk in making such connections, most of which comes from the unavoidable need we have to lend “our” framework to “their” story. Usually we can’t help it; it’s the only framework we know. That’s a problem that Ralph Ellison’s narrator keeps pointing out over and over again. The problem of making other people “invisible” isn’t just that we don’t see them, it’s that we see them in certain ways. The most obvious example is one that several of you have alluded to throughout the semester—the sidewalk encounter with an African American male. Something clicks, and in an instant we re-make that person in our image of him. I don’t think Ellison is calling for us to be naïve in this respect and to ignore all sorts of statistics and geographical boundaries. I think that, among the many points his book makes is this one: that “click” happens for lots of African Americans as well, because African American lives and communities are complicated and no stereotype holds.

Some people think that by acknowledging issues like this we subject ourselves to a kind of politically correct relativism that freezes our ability to say anything about anyone. I don’t agree. I think that what follows from issues like this is a call to be more self-aware. So, for example, when we compile our class exhibit, that’s one of the issues that has to lurk in the back of our minds and come out in what we produce. We need to demonstrate that we have thought about the differences between our world and the one we are describing; furthermore, we have to consider our audience, a much more diverse Washington neighborhood today that at any time in the past, and one that (at first glance)may or may not care about the history we are trying construct. Can we make it meaningful to them as well?

I’ve made it this far in this post without even mentioning the most recent (and potent) example of telling other stories: the election of Barack Obama. We need to save a full discussion of that for another time, but I did want to add one point related to the challenge of knowing other people and telling their stories. I was so dismayed to hear about recent incidents on campus where students have made comments about Obama that amount to racial assumptions and slurs. The most troubling by far are those that spoke about the need to assassinate him. Besides the evil buried in such a statement, there is another point that is more insidious because it is not as obvious: this is the way many people think such stories should end. Implied in comments about assassinating Obama are assumptions like “this is what happens to people who have such ideas, ideals, plans, visions.” For many Americans there is a stereotypical ending to such stories, stereotypes that are supported by significant evidence. It makes me think about how incredibly important it is to end the stories we imagine in ways that promote beliefs and actions that we admire and respect. If you are a believer in something sacred, the endings of stories become very significant. After all, if the divine enters into life at any point it is probably at those places where the stories we tell end, where we reach the conclusion of what we can say about a man, a woman, or the world. Under those circumstances, our stories should finish, I suppose, with the responsible acknowledgement that something else will follow. We should write with the realization that we really don’t have the last word.