Chapter 1 Introduction: The Pillowman and Storytelling
1.7 Chapter Organization
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“displacement from the past into the present” (Erwin 567). For another, this displacement and the retrieval of the past are actualized in the clinical relation between the analyst and the analysand. Storytelling and transference denote the similar dynamic relation between the teller and the listener. For Brooks, storytelling is indeed a “dialogic relation of narrative production and interpretation” (Brooks, Psychoanalysis 50). He furthermore asserts that most narratives present the
“transferential condition,” which is related to the eagerness to the transmissibility of the stories, “the need to be heard” (50). This dynamic relation resembles a transactional relation between the analyst and the analysand in psychoanalytical therapeutic process. Because the transferential relation is a process of transmission, interpretation, and reconstruction, between the teller and the listener, there is a marginal space of interpretation and filling of imagination defined as the
“transferential space.” As claimed by Brooks, it is the place “of fictions, of reproductions, of reprints, of repetitions,” the marginal space where change is effected,
“through interpretation and construction” (68). In The Pillowman, the transferential relation between the storytellers and the listeners presents such space of interpretation and reconstruction.
1.7 Chapter Organization
This thesis is separated into four chapters. Chapter One is the prefatory chapter laying out the introduction of Martin McDonagh, his plays, The Pillowman, and the contents of this thesis. Chapter Two, “The Storyteller and Self-Deception,” examines Katurian who is the main storyteller in this play. This chapter argues that Katurian employs storytelling as a self-deceptive way to console himself from the distressing past without really facing up to the trauma. Katurian writes tales to produce an
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imaginary space where he creates another self to live in the revision of his traumatic past. Thus he attains a self-deceptive way to console himself by transforming those agonizing recollections into the versions he can accept. Eventually he identifies with the fictional characters created by himself and gets preoccupied with his own imaginary life structures. Chapter Three, “The Story-Listener and Self-Deception,”
deals with the other three characters to argue that although the other three characters keep evading looking back to their past and even living in self-evasion, to some extent, they attain self-deceptive explanations for their traumas. Through the narrative relations in storytelling, Michal, Ariel, and Tupolski, as the story-listeners, interpret and construct the meanings of the tales of Katurian. The interpretations of the tales help them to reinterpret and to reconstruct their past. Thus they find self-deceptive explanations for their traumas and reach an empathetic consensus with Katurian by reinterpreting their traumatic past. At the same time, they are storytellers who spell out the self-comforting plot structures for them to confront with their present.
However, they always hold resistance to facing up to the traumas. All of the three characters are trapped in their self-deception and self-evasion in the confrontation with their traumas. Chapter Four “Self-Deception or Self-Consolation?” is the concluding chapter that wraps up how storytelling and self-deception affect the four characters and how self-deception is served as self-consolation for these characters.
Although self-deception blocks their eyes to see reality, it comforts them to some degrees when they look back to their past.
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20
“Since then, at an uncertain hour/That agony returns, / And till my ghastly tale is told/This heart within me burns.”
---Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
“All our interior world is reality, and that perhaps more so than our apparent world.”
---Marc Chagall
2.1 Introduction
Storytelling, or narrative, is ubiquitous in the human world. According to Roland Barthes, narrative is present in “almost infinite diversity of forms,” such as myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, drama and so forth (Barthes 80). Theodore Sarbin proposes that narrative is a “root metaphor” of psychology since it is “an organizing principle for human action” (9). So immersed in narrative, people also apply narrative to “recount and reassess the meaning of our past” and even to forestall the future (Brooks, Reading for the Plot 3).
Storytelling is also the essential heartbeat of The Pillowman: the protagonist is a storywriter; many tales written by the protagonist are narrated and related in the play;
the written tales are enacted in Act One Scene Two and Act Two Scene Two. Because the progression of the plot in this play is propelled by many stories and tales, storytelling is pervasive in The Pillowman.
Among all the characters, the storywriter, Katurian, is the main storyteller triggering other people not only to argue over the essence of storytelling but also to tell stories to confront with their traumas and to relieve themselves. Being an involved victim of parental maltreatment and the murderer of parricide, Katurian deals with his traumas by tale-writing which enables him to build up an imaginary space to suture reality and imagination. By so doing Katurian reconstructs the past and constructs reality in order to relieve himself of the sense of guilt of the parricide and of the
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disturbing memory. He operates storytelling as a self-deceptive way of soothing his traumas.
This chapter argues that as a storyteller/story-writer, Katurian falls into a state of self-deception and buries himself into an imaginary space he creates. Writing tales grants Katurian a potential to revise his life stories as new versions accepted by himself. When writing tales, Katurian fabricates the new plot structure and new identity for his stories. Preoccupied with his own tales, he starts to go through a self-deceptive way by living in the fabricated plot structure and identifying with the character created by himself. With reality and fiction interpenetrated and undifferentiated, ultimately the storyteller becomes a self-deceiver who disavows and refuses to admit reality.
2.2 Storytelling as a Means of Self-deception
Storytelling makes people get immersed in self-deception very likely when people are inclined to treat life as stories. The faculty of storytelling helps people to contrive a plot structure to interpret and construct their life experiences, but it possibly affects people to misrecognize their life as their imaginary plots and to live in self-deception. Storytelling is indispensable in human life, because people tend to interpret and construct their life experiences by cutting continuing life into chunks of life stories to rationalize and to organize their thoughts and lived experiences.
Assembling fragments of life into clusters of stories depends on one’s ability of organization and imagination. With imagination, people can not only come up with plots to arrange their life stories but also visualize themselves as characters who take action in the stories. Once they treat themselves as characters, presumably they will become too preoccupied by their identity as characters to differentiate reality from
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imagination. In the end, they misidentify themselves and get engrossed in illusion and self-deception.
2.2.1 Storytelling as an Organizing Principle
Storytelling is a psychological mechanism that has tremendous impacts on people because it shapes and organizes thoughts. Sarbin proposes that the narrative is an organizing principle for human action. People tend to describe daily life with an implicit or explicit application of plots, and plots influence the flow of action: “[t]he narrative is a way of organizing episodes, actions, and accounts of actions; it is an achievement that brings together mundane facts and fantastic creations; time and place are incorporated. The narrative allows for the inclusion of actors’ reasons for their acts, as well as the causes of happening” (Sarbin 9). In other words, the narrative and storytelling is a means for people to order, to arrange, and to explain the past, so as to sort out causes and effects in daily life. It provides an explanation and disposition for life which streams in ongoing time and space.
Sarbin borrows Stephen Pepper’s notion of “root metaphor” to explicate the narrative as a crucial root metaphor because people are inclined to pin down ever-changing and infinite life to a finite story with the scaffolding of contexts. Root metaphors, as Pepper defines it, are the piloting categories that direct people to understand, explain, and define this world: “[i]n terms of these categories he [every individual] proceeds to study all other area of facts[…] He undertakes to interpret all facts in terms of these categories” (qtd. in Sarbin 5). According to Pepper’s definition, there are four root metaphors: formism, mechanism, organism, and contextualism.
Among the four, the idea of contextualism, as Sarbin appropriates, is related to the narrative. Contextualism purports to explain fluctuating and fluid life incidents in a
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contextual cause-effect frame. Sarbin explicates it as “an ongoing texture of multiply elaborated events, each leading to others, each being influenced by collateral episodes, and by the efforts of multiple agents who engage in actions to satisfy their needs and meet their obligation” (6). Hubert Hermans and Harry Kempen expound that contextualism presupposes to form multiplicity of past, present, and future as an interconnected unity and totality. Eventually contextualism helps life to reach a “final causation” (Hermans and Kempen16). In so doing the person as a storyteller is in a continuous process of meaning construction for arranging events as a whole and is oriented to “the active realization of purpose and goals” (Hermans and Kempen 16).
Peter Brooks also asserts the importance of storytelling as drawing lines for life and regularizing human life and psychology. In his viewpoint, plot is the most crucial principle that makes stories “finite and comprehensible,” so that the narrative
“demarcates, encloses, establishes limits, orders” (Reading for the Plot 4). This characteristic also contributes to psychoanalysis which interprets chaotic dreams, because analysts are able to “reconstruct intentions and connections, [and] to replot the dream as narrative” (Brooks, Reading for the Plot 5). Psychoanalysis is a science of interpreting narratives related by patients; narratives told by patients are composed of certain events in patients’ life. To help patients, analysts reexamine their life events, which furtively but enormously influence patients, and analysts in turn extract
“clinical significance” and interpret patients’ narratives (Erwin 336).
The characteristic of organizing life of storytelling thus helps people to deal with their trauma. Since narrative facilitates people to put chaotic incidents into orderly structure, it rescues victims of traumatization from upheaval back to normal.
Michele Crossley asserts that narrative helps people to maintain coherence, unity, meaningfulness and identity after experiences of traumatization by bringing the
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disrupted routine back to normal order and connection, which “re-establish[es] a semblance of meaning in the life” (11). In addition to its normalizing function, storytelling also induces catharsis. Richard Kearney explores ways in which narrative provides cathartic release for victims of trauma by having victims return to their past and search for a way to make a compromise with their future: “[t]he recounting of experience through the formal medium of plot, fiction or spectacle permits us to repeat the past forward so to speak […] In the play of narrative re-creation we are invited to revisit our lives—through the actions and personas of others —so as to live them otherwise. We discover a way to give a future to the past” (51, italic in the original). Narrative provides a plot structure and new characters for victims of traumatization to revisit the past with a more disinterested and unaffected attitude so that the victims can adjust their past to their present and future more easily. Therefore, the components of the narrative, such as “displacement”, “condensation”,
“emplotment”, “schematism”, “estrangement” and “synthesis” enable people to touch upon “the reality of the suffering which could not be faced head-on or at first-hand”
(56).
2.2.2 Storytelling and Imagination
Composed by reality and imagination, narrative helps victims to revisit their past and re-construct it to tread on their present and future, and to re-order their smashed past broken by the attack of trauma.12 Storytelling, or narrative, serves such purpose because it provides people with a context to give explanations and interpretations for their traumatic past. Moreover, storytelling makes available an in-between space
12 Nerea Arruti discusses the academic repertoire of the concern in trauma and representation, including writing about trauma. But she doubts if such representation is able to serve therapeutic function, since “the interconnection between critical thought and art cannot erase the shattering of the glass, the wounded word” (7).
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where reality and imagination coexist, since reconstruction needs imagination to fill in the gaps between the addition and omission of reality. Since stories consist of reality and imagination, storytelling is filled with real and imaginative dialogues.
Hubert Hermans and Els Hermans-Jansen make suppositions for narratives: “stories acknowledge both the perception of reality and the power of imagination (e.g., in filling the gaps in one’s memory and in anticipating future events); whereas stories combine fact and fiction, the telling of stories involves real and imaginal (sic) dialogues” (11).
Imagination and fantasy contribute integration to our recognition of this world.
In psychoanalytic exposition, fantasy is an unconscious psychical structure underlying neurotic behavioral traits or symptoms. It is also a consciously imaginative narrative or scenario experienced in daily life; therefore, it consists of “repressed material (in disguised form)” and “items derived from genuine childhood experiences” (Erwin 188). Sigmund Freud regards fantasy as the product of the unsatisfied wishes: “[t]he motive forces of phantasies [fantasies] are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality” (qtd. in Erwin 188). Developing from psychoanalytical elucidation of fantasy, Bruno Bettelheim puts stress on the credit of fantasy to complete personality and give people stimulus to meet the difficulty of life:
The unconscious is the source of raw materials and the basis upon which the ego erects the edifice of our personality. In this simile our fantasies are the natural resources which provide and shape this raw material, making it useful for the ego’s personality-building tasks. If we are deprived of this natural resource, our life remains limited; without fantasies to give us hope, we do not have the strength to meet the adversities of life. (Bettleheim 121)
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In this way, fantasy and imagination grant people possibilities to form their personality and their perspective of seeing the world. With the assistance of fantasy, people are able to re-construct their recognition and to confront with their sufferings by providing themselves with explanations and justifications.
2.2.3 Storytelling and I-Me Relation
Since stories are made up of reality and imagination, storytelling is also an action combined with real undertaking and imaginative maneuver. When plotting the stories, a storyteller or a storywriter has to produce imaginary roles and characters to participate in stories. To narrate stories, construct the fictional world, and plot the imaginary events, a storyteller needs to invent and develop roles and characters in the tales, as the characters are normally the agents taking actions in plots and events.
Therefore, storytelling or story-writing is always a process with regard to imaginary interaction with characters in stories.
When a story is autobiographically related to the life of the narrator, the imaginary character will become the narrator himself. The narrator and the narrated character are the same person, sharing the same self. The distinction between the two lies in the former is the subject I, while the latter changes into the object Me. The storyteller, at this moment, splits into two selves. While one lives his life, the other tells life as if he is an outsider; living and telling become concurrent: “lives are told in being lived and lived in being told” (Carr 61). Sarbin also utilizes it to interpret narrative writing. While the I expresses the author, the Me can be seen as the character. When it comes to self-narrative, the I is the self as an author, whereas the Me is the self as a protagonist in the narrative. This narrative construction enables the author to “imagine the future and reconstruct the past” (Sarbin 18). With the Me as
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the imaginary character, the author, or the I, is able to map out the world in the story, retrospect the past or envisage the future.
In psychological studies, I-Me relation is discussed very often to describe the split of self. Julian Jaynes explains consciousness with a spatialized metaphor “mind-space” (46). In this mind-space, there is an “Analog I” which is the subject moving in our imagination and doing things that we are not really doing. There is also a
“Metaphor Me,” a kind of object and “autoscopic images” that we see of ourselves (63). These two attributes work in our consciousness by means of narration which is a process for the “Analog I” to explain and to illustrate the “Metaphor Me” in the streams of ongoing consciousness. Through explanation and illustration of the object of the self, the “Analog I” thus obtains references to examine himself. With this course of action, the image of the “Metaphor Me” will gradually influence the
“Analog I” and determine the latter; the two will become reconciled. This reconciliation designates our life story in a more compatible form. As Jaynes states,
“situations are chosen which are congruent to this ongoing story, until the picture I have of myself in my life story determines how I am to act and choose in novel situations as they arise” (64). In this sense, the “Analog I” depends on the “Metaphor Me” to reconstruct his life story and to scheme the ongoing plots for the life story.
Adriana Cavarero connects self-narrative to psychological development of the narratable self. For her, writing an autobiographical story is to satisfy the desire of unity. Cavarero establishes her conclusion from Hannah Arendt’s conception of “the narratable self.” In Arendt’s view, every human being perceives this world and himself or herself through the interaction with the other. To construct, to understand, and to tell the life-story of the self, the self needs an other to perceive itself. At this moment, the narratable self comes into being as the other of the self. Ambiguously,
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the narratable self is an in-between mechanism, an identity simultaneously as the subject (the self) initiating the narration and as the object (the other) being narrated, which creates ambiguity. The interplay of this ambiguity makes people live their lives as they are living their own stories, “without being able to distinguish the I who narrates it from the self who is narrated” (Cavarero 34, italics in the original). When narrating the life-story of the self, personal memory interferes and influences the narration, because it operates to “go on forgetting, re-elaborating, selecting and
the narratable self is an in-between mechanism, an identity simultaneously as the subject (the self) initiating the narration and as the object (the other) being narrated, which creates ambiguity. The interplay of this ambiguity makes people live their lives as they are living their own stories, “without being able to distinguish the I who narrates it from the self who is narrated” (Cavarero 34, italics in the original). When narrating the life-story of the self, personal memory interferes and influences the narration, because it operates to “go on forgetting, re-elaborating, selecting and