The First Rule of Storytelling: You Don’t Talk About Storytelling

Does that title make sense in the context of what I’m about to type? Probably not. But, rest assured, it will contain the word “storytelling”. This is largely due to the fact that I can’t really imagine discussing Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman without it.

The Pillowman is one of those plays that have a number of striking flaws in feasibility, sensibility, and saleability, but it grabs you and makes you think nonetheless. I’d read it before I saw the production yesterday afternoon at Canstage’s Berkeley Theatre, so I knew what to expect. In a way, that’s a bit of a disappointment: I’m sure there’s nothing like those surprises leaping out at you onstage, that dull sense of mounting horror.

The chief story, though there are many others sprinkled throughout, like side-quests in a video game, raisins in a cake, or bad similes in a blog entry, is that of Katurian K. Katurian, a writer who lives in a totalitarian state. As the metaphorical curtain rises, our hero is being interrogated about his short stories by two brutal policemen. Turns out, Katurian’s favourite motif is unhappy children who are in some way maimed or killed – all within the bounds of art, you understand, and not at all gratuitous or gleeful. As all three characters agree, while child-murder is a crime, writing stories about it isn’t. However, the salient question is, as Katurian is about to find out, how about writing stories that inspire child-murder?

Because, you see, someone – for a while, we aren’t sure who – has been going around bumping off kids in the horrendously gruesome ways Katurian has described in his fiction. When we do find out the identity of the culprit, he strenuously claims that he wouldn’t have done so if he hadn’t had the stories to motivate him, and this seems quite plausible.

So. Should Katurian not have written those stories? Should they be burned? Who bears moral responsibility for the deaths of the children?

Now, clearly, there’s a lot more in the play than that. It’s full of witty dialogue, scalp-prickling drama, suspense, and, inset here and there, strangely compelling storytelling sequences. The version I saw was beautifully acted (although I could have done without the scrim separating the second level of the stage from the house, behind which Katurian’s stories were acted out and on which occasional random phrases were projected in a distracting and extraneous fashion). There are also many more themes than the one I have chosen to pick out: what is the relationship of fiction to reality? What is a “happy ending”? Does one’s horrific past excuse or somehow adulterate the wickedness of the horrific acts one commits in the present?

However, the question of an artist’s ethical responsibilities in his or her work is the one that intrigues me the most. Throughout the play, Katurian insists that the first duty of a storyteller is to tell a story. However, as becomes increasingly apparent, “just telling a story” is no better a reason than “just following orders”. Because, whatever Katurian’s intentions, his stories have caused harm.

Maybe this appeals to me because I utterly reject the idea that a story is “just a story”. I don’t care if Harry Potter is “just for kids”*; I don’t care if Sleepless in Seattle is meant to be a night of brain-dead fun; I don’t care if Cats is an excuse to watch dancers in Spandex gyrate around the stage. No matter how little an artist intends her audience to take away from her work, they are taking away something.

The form and content of stories are the means by which cultures transmit their values. This can be obvious, as in fairytales that try to teach you to always share what you have or to be nice to strangers, or subtle, as in the way the inclusion of homosexual protagonists in YA fiction sends the tacit message that homosexuals ought to be acknowledged and accepted (or in the way that their omission in the past implied their exclusion from “normal” society). To say you are just trying to entertain when your story depicts, say, Hispanic people, in an unflattering light is as inadequate a justification as saying you were just trying to be funny when you told your Great-Aunt Murgatroyd her face would crack mirrors. Maybe your intentions were completely innocent in both cases, but that doesn’t change the fact that your actions weren’t. Though first-degree murder is a more serious crime, people are still convicted for manslaughter.

Allow me to interject here that people often confuse moral condemnation and censorship. An argument I’ve heard goes: “you can’t tell me I shouldn’t say what I say, because I have the right to free speech”. True, you do. However, it is that very right that attaches moral responsibility to you and no other. No one is forcing you to say what you say. The ideas expressed are there solely because you want them to be. Hence, if I find what you say morally reprehensible, I am free to criticize your morals for choosing to say it. Where it turns into censorship is when I prevent you from talking.

Clearly, the issue is far from simple, as The Pillowman takes care to point out. Even if we accept that an artist is responsible for the ideas he puts forward in his work, there’s still the question of to what extent he is responsible for what other people draw from it.

As a real-life example, consider the recent LJ-wank, wherein, to counter child pornography, the administrators of Livejournal banned all sexual content featuring minors. Under this category, they included fiction starring any non-adult characters who commit a sexual act. So non-pedophiliac fanfiction writers who, say, shipped Harry/Snape suddenly found their accounts deleted.

Obviously, photographs of actual children in sexual positions are child pornography. But what about drawings of those subjects? What if the children in them aren’t even real people – like, say, an NC-17 fanart of Hermione and Ron? What if I write a book where two ten-year-olds go at it like monkeys? At what point are these actions wrong?

With that in mind, it’s time for a way-oversimplified philosophical interlude! Yayayay! *balloons and confetti fall from the ceiling*

So, Emmanuel Kant says an act is only morally right if you could reasonably wish that everyone else would carry it out – eg, no matter what the circumstances, if you don’t think it would be a good idea for everyone to lie, then it’s wrong for you to lie. John Stuart Mill, on the other hand, says the moral thing to do is that which results in the greatest good for the greatest number**. For Kant, there is something intrinsic to the act itself that makes it right or wrong; for Mill, it’s the effects of the act that count.

Going with Mill: HP pr0n? W/e! Since the characters depicted are fictional, it’s causing some people pleasure and not hurting anyone else, so it’s AOK. Unless you can show that the existence of a story describing Neville Longbottom sleeping with Remus Lupin encourages people to go out and molest actual kids – then, it’s incontrovertibly wrong. Going with Kant: first, we have to decide if there’s a qualitative difference between depicting real kids in sexual situations and fictional ones. This may take us a while. If there is a difference, it’s probably OK. If not, it’s wrong.

What do I think? I dunno. I mean, clearly, everything would be a lot easier if people just didn’t want to draw a Sirius/Harry/Fred threesome or write stories about children swallowing apples with razors in them or shoot movies about violent, homicidal teenagers (Oliver Stone, I’m lookin’ at you). But, unfortunately for simplicity, in real life, all those things are legitimate forms of art. Personally, as a writer, my main concern is to make sure my stories don’t glorify or support actions and attitudes I think are wrong. After all, you can’t control everything a reader is going to get out of your work, but you can certainly do your very best to express yourself clearly and succinctly.

Speaking of “succinctly”, this is getting kind of long. As the Animaniacs would put it: wheel of morality, turn, turn, turn; tell us the lesson we should learn. Today’s moral is: I liked The Pillowman. Go see it, if you can.

* Which, by the by, also gets my goat. Are human beings not supposed to think until the age of majority?

** Because this was way-oversimplified philosophy and not the real thing, I’m not going to get into the problems with defining an act separately from the circumstances under which it’s committed or how, precisely, one judges the magnitude of a good.

2 Replies to “The First Rule of Storytelling: You Don’t Talk About Storytelling”

  1. Ooooo, that sounds like an interesting play. But (and maybe I missed something obvious, sorry) is it called the Pillowman? Or would that destroy the viewing experience? The only thing I can think of is he smothered children with pillows…

    I guess I lean more towards a story is just a story view. Not to say that story’s don’t impart meaning or ideas or whatever, but that the idea of holding every author accountable for what everybody gets out of their story isn’t really feasible. I mean, if you write a story that directly says “I think we should all murder babies” I’ll definitely have a word for you. But what about people who take meanings out of something that most people wouldn’t don’t see?

    Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon because he was inspired by Catcher in the Rye. Manson thought George Harrison’s song “Little Piggies” was a message to go stab a bunch of people. I’d give my shirt that Salinger and Harrison (along with 99% of the population) were WTF????, but that doesn’t negate the fact that a bunch of people are dead. Should they stop writing because a few people out there will “use” their story in a destructive way? And on a possibly less important note, is it fair to take away a story that gives comfort/happiness/entertainment/other good things to the majority because one person might take it in a different and “bad” way?

    I mean, if the author in the Pillowman stopped writing about murdering children and began writing about say, the gloriousness about sunshine and rainbows and puppies, whose to say somebody out there wouldn’t start going around burning people to death because they were filled with the awe at the awesome power of light. Or abandon their family to go raise a puppy farm. Okay, this sounds retarded. But you know what, there probably is somebody out somewhere who would take it that way. And the only way I can see to stop people being inspired in “wrong” ways by stories is to stop writing them altogether.

    Actually, let me modify that last bit. I’m not sure whether people who get inspired in a “bad” way would necessarily stop just because there weren’t any books/stories/movies anymore. Whose to say they wouldn’t overhear something in a conversation, see something most people would find innocuous that would inspire them in a similar way. I guess I don’t really see how someone would murder kids JUST because they read a story about it, so I’ll have to see the play. Other than not doing anything EVER, I don’t see how we can stop people from being inadvertently inspired.

    Because people can be “inadvertenly” inspired, I’m not sure if writing more succinctly would help the problem. And how to you gague if something is succinct enough anyways? And not to mention, Season in Hell by Rimbaud is possibly the most non succinct thing I’d ever written. And it would be sad if things were considered more dangerous just because they weren’t perfectly clear.

    Of course a story isn’t just a story isn’t just a story. And who knows, maybe writing more succinctly is a good thing. But I don’t think it will ever completely eliminate the problem.

    I feel like I just argued with you about something you didn’t bring up. Oh well.

    BTW, I read somewhere that JK Rowling announced at a book signing or something that Dumbledore was gay.

  2. Diana –

    Best non-sequitur conclusion ever. Sadly, it made the front page of the Toronto Star. Like, the real front page. Not even just the entertainment section front page. Real news? What’s that?

    I agree with you that, perhaps, that I ought to have thought more about the “clearly and succinctly” part, but see how cleverly I segued it into the ending? Eh? EH????

    Hmmm… I also agree that an author isn’t responsible for EVERYTHING a reader gets out of his or her work, because, as you say, he or she lacks complete control over that. My main point, I think, is that an artist can’t claim exemption from moral responsibility by saying stories are not written for moral purposes because even entertaining stories serve a normative function. Where it becomes interesting, I think, is where you have to draw the line. If I write a story in which the heroine wants to be a doctor but eventually learns that’s wrong because all women should be happy housewives and lives happily ever after with her dominating husband, most people would agree I’m perpetuating sexism (assuming the tone of my story is sincere rather than ironic… a pretty hefty assumption, I admit, but I still think we can recognize that difference). If I write a story about a boy who, I don’t know, steals a magic sword and has wonderful adventures, and all the good female characters are housewives and all the rotten ones are career women, am I still perpetuating sexism? What about a story in which a sympathetic character has sexist views? Or one in which I don’t see sexism and you don’t see sexism, but Jack the Ripper over there sees a call to murder female prostitutes? There’s a huge difference between the first and the last, but what’s the distinction? Reading over your comment, I see we pretty much agree on this and I have typed it all out for nothing. Except maybe to avoid calling a random person on the telephone to ask questions about university applications. :P

    Anyway, “The Pillowman” refers to the title character of one of Katurian’s stories, a giant man made of pillows whose job it is to comfort people who are about to commit suicide, and to go back in time and get them to kill themselves when they’re still happy children so they don’t have to experience life’s sorrows. (Yeah, I know.) But it also sort of refers to Katurian in a bunch of metaphorical, thinking-too-much kind of ways. But I guess I can’t really talk about “thinking-too-much” when I use the word “normative” in the above paragraph. ANYWAY, you should totally read and/or see the play, because I think you’d like the parts that aren’t the implausible bits. See it first if you can, though.

    I tried to get out at the wrong part of the revolving door at the library today. I think I may have given myself a black eye…

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