"In telling the story of my father's life, it's impossible to separate fact from fiction, the man from the myth. The best I can do is to tell it the way he told me. It doesn't always make sense and most of it never happened... but that's what kind of story this is."
-Big Fish
Watch "Big Fish" finale
When I think of storytellers, I think of both my grandfather and Albert Finney's character from Tim Burton's 2003 film "Big Fish." "Big Fish" is a tale of a father/son relationship in which the son must come to grips with the scattered pieces of his dying father's life. A perpetual storyteller, Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) raises his son Will (Billy Crudup) upon stories- marvelous, fantastical stories that are based in truth but leave Will feeling as if he only knows a fictionalized version of his father. Ultimately, Will comes to uncover the complex man behind the larger than life stories, and father and son reconcile their relationship in a heartwarming final scene where both engage in the act of storytelling. I believe that Burton really gets at the essence of storytellers and what their stories mean in "Big Fish," and the movie echoes some of the themes that Walter Benjamin develops in his essay "The Storyteller."
In the outset of his essay, Benjamin describes how there have historically been two types of storytellers: the "resident tiller of the soil" and the "trading seaman." In other words, storytellers who draw on the lore of the past and their own rootedness in a place or storytellers who draw on the lore of faraway places and their own travels. Edward Bloom is most definitely of the later variety, for the movie chronicles his travels out of small town Alabama into the wider world. Benjamin characterizes the storyteller as one who promotes the communicability of experience, counseling his or her listeners with the great well of wisdom arising from oral tradition. Storytelling, according to Benjamin, is at its' heart, a communal endeavor, while the novel, as a form, embodies isolation:
"The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life's fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living."
Burton does a good job of capturing the community that shapes Edward Bloom's stories and the communicability of experience that characterizes his life. The colorful characters that enter Bloom's life at different stages provide the wisdom and "counsel" that Benjamin attributes to the storyteller, and the viewer very much gets the sense that Bloom has led an existence that is far from alienated. Despite the separation between Bloom and his son, it is evident that his stories are born out of human connection rather than out of isolated, industrial capitalist experience- the experience that gives birth to the novel.
The most clear parallel that I can draw between Benjamin's description of the storyteller and Burton's portrayal of Edward Bloom is the idea that stories are not expendable. Unlike information, which proves relevant only in a transitory instant, stories go on gathering new meaning with age. Benjamin writes that a story "preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time." In a similar way, the stories that compose Edward Bloom's life develop renewed value for his son as an adult. As a child, Will loved the stories that his father spun, cherishing them for their magical characters and impossible outcomes. Yet, as he grew older, he began to despise the fictionalization of life that his father made his craft. He wanted real information, a way of relating to his father in an authentic way based upon truth. As Will finally comes to embrace his father's makeup as a natural born storyteller, he can see the old stories from a new perspective-- see them for their deeper meaning that negates the need for factual information. Somehow the fabrications hold more insight into his father's life than the simple truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment