Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin: Storyteller Tom Walker

Story vs. Narration Narrative turns the raw material of story—the “telling” of a concatenation of events unfolding in linear time—into a (more or less) artful organization of those events that may complicate their chronology, suggest their significance, emphasize their affect or invite their interpretation. Narrative poetry heightens this process by framing the act of telling in the rhythmically and sonically constructed language of verse. From entry on ‘Narrative Poetry’ in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th edition, 2012)

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me--- That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads---you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite Other Stories? It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. […] From Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’ (1833)

What kind of story? What is to be the subject of these lectures? I have called them Varieties of Parable but with some misgiving; I don’t like the word ‘parable; and it suggests something much to narrow for my purpose, namely the parables of the New Testament. On the other hand the other possible words seemed even less satisfactory. […] According to the Oxford Dictionary, ‘parable’ means ‘any saying or narration in which something is expressed in terms of something else’. ‘Also,’ it adds, ‘any kind of enigmatical or dark saying .’ This should certainly cover the whole range of my specimens from the Faerie Queen, which Spenser himself described as a ‘dark conceit’, to The Ancient Mariner, Waiting for Godot, Pincher Martin or the poems of Edwin Muir. Louis MacNeice, Varieties of Parable (1965)

Silent Stories [the poem] surprisingly draws together the Magdalene penitents and this nun in charge, in their common confinement in the institution and now in their shared ‘sifting’ [...] in and by the earth they have all become. We recognize maybe only retrospectively that this is the insight delivered by the opening line, with its macabre and shocking charge: ‘The soil frayed and sifted evens the score’. Yet the poem stops short of pretending to an even score in terms of power between the woman in authority and the totally subservient and ineradicably disgraced women under her thumb. The poem’s delicate and precise language traces the oppression of a life where a glance exchanged is ‘blinded and bleached out’; the natural playfulness of young women is poignantly displaced onto the ‘steam’, which alone is free to dance around the stone drains, giggling and slipping across the water [...] The reverend mother’s speech is a note of horror which blares through her own skull; only now she recognizes the ‘parasite’ power ‘that grew in me’; and only now can the bunch of keys, sign of her gatekeeping function, ‘slacken and fall’. Patricia Coughlan, ‘“No Lasting Fruit At All’: Containing, Recognition, and Relinquishing in The Girl Who Married the Reindeer’, Irish University Review 37.1 (2007)