THE TELLER AND THE TALE

 

 

“Be ye therefore perfect.” 

                                                                        Matthew 5.5.48

 

 “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”  Thus D H Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature.   I first came across that statement – at second hand - as a student, and I have been wrestling with the implications ever since.  

            It is one of those profound and difficult concepts that get deeper the more you think about them.  Keats’ dictum – or maybe only Keats’ urn’s dictum – “’Beauty is truth, truth beauty’” is another such.

Do truth and beauty share such a link?  Well maybe, and maybe not.  Maybe there is beauty in the truth of a mathematical formula.  But what if you manage to prove to a colleague that his beautiful wife has been cheating on him with his best friend?   Truth it may be, but it is hardly a beautiful truth, any more than confirming a terminal illness for a child would be.  And insofar as the woman has been lying to him, then beauty has not been truthful.   Lawrence’s Teller and Tale throw up similar paradoxes for me, and even if they are irresolvable, they throw an interesting light on some aspects of creativity.

            Never trust the artist.  Does that include the Lawrence who is making the statement?   In which case, is the statement itself unreliable?  In which case, why should the tale be any more reliable than the person who produced it?  Or has the statement become the ‘tale’ once it has been made, and independent of its originator?  And so on.  It is all very difficult.

 

 I think one of the things Lawrence was arguing for in his statement was not to confuse a writer’s work with a writer’s life.  Are they, in fact, separable?  That depends, presumably, on the type of writer.  Fine if the writer is simply exploring experience, and not passing comment or judgement.  But if the writer is didactic – Lawrence himself is arguably a case in point – conceives of art as propaganda and wants his/her audience to think or behave in particular ways, then we are entitled to ask if such writers have followed their own precepts.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for instance, is a novel with a message:  escape the dehumanizing effects of the Machine Age through sex.  Some readers of the work have undoubtedly taken this as a recipe for personal fulfilment, and responded accordingly in both language and sexual behaviour; but how far Lawrence himself escaped the effects of the machine by this means, I don’t presume to know...

Perhaps I picked a bad example.  More promising, perhaps, is Rousseau’s Emile. Emile has been a significant influence in formulating theories of education.  It comes as a shock, therefore, to find that Rousseau dumped each of his own offspring on the steps of the nearby Foundling Hospital.  Does that then, negate his right to tell the rest of us how to bring up children?  Does the unreliability of the life of the teller undermine the validity of the tale?  Or did Rousseau have true perceptions – the real-life Emile was a young aristocrat whom Rousseau tutored, evidently with success – even if he could not fulfil them in his own life with his own family?  A prophet shall have honour everywhere except in his own home town. 

Or, to keep the biblical theme, “Physician, heal thyself.”   When I was at university, the senior doctor in charge of student health walked with two sticks.  I remember a friend of mine laughing about him and saying he hardly inspired confidence in the university’s health service.

As it happened, the doctor in question had sustained injuries in the war, and was crippled in ways not curable this side of eternity.  That emphatically did not stop him from being efficient and caring, or from curing people less radically damaged than himself.  Perhaps the same even holds true for mental health.  In Equus, the child psychiatrist Martin Dysart is able to heal the minds of others, while remaining a psychological mess himself.    In Lawrence’s terms, with each of these instances the ‘tale’ is reliable, even when the ‘teller’ is not. 

 

Actors, and the confusing in the minds of some of the public between the actor and the role portrayed are of particular interest in considering Lawrence’s dictum.

Let us take the case of Rock Hudson.  Rock Hudson played a succession of  macho ‘rock-like’ male roles.  Female cinema goers  who took him at face value swooned about him and – presumably - fantasized about him.  Which is the point: fantasy.  At Hudson’s death – from an Aids-related illness  -  the speculation about him definitively emerged in the public arena..  Hudson had been a homosexual,  with a personality and private life quite unlike what was portrayed on screen.  The ‘teller’ – Hudson – was clearly very unlike the tale.  Why, then, should we trust the tale?  The tale was a lie.  Hudson’s personality and sexual orientation were the reality.

 Or were they?  Presumably some of the types he was portraying are real types that were recognised as such by cinema audiences.   Hudson’s ‘truth’ was his ability to portray them convincingly.  By this line of argument, his own personality is an irrelevance: the ‘teller’ is the scriptwriter, and the ‘tale’ is Hudson’s portrayal of the script on screen. 

(The converse also holds true. Thus, The Importance of Being Earnest: “I hope you haven’t been secretly good all the time?” Larry Hagman was, in real life, unlike the devious JR of Dallas.  Television audiences are often surprised by the demeanour – even the accents – of villains from the soaps when they appear on various chat shows.  And so on.) 

We are all familiar with the concept of not shooting the messenger.  The messenger is only delivering the message; he is not responsible for creating it.  Since an actor has not written his /her own lines, is the actor akin to the messenger?

But can the messenger be so separated from the message?  ”More things… than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  Which of the last two words you emphasize profoundly affects the meaning, and will depend on your reading of Hamlet’s character.  Different actors interpret Hamlet in different ways, and so – in effect – give different messages.

Or consider the case of Pheidippides the Athenian runner who sought help from the Spartans before the Battle of Marathon.  Pheidippides is supposed to have run 159 miles in two days.  The message itself was one thing, the physical stamina was another, without which the message would not have been delivered in time..  But we cannot ignore the moral dimension to the runner either: the sense of urgency for Greece, and loyalty to his own community.  In that sense the message is not something apart from the messenger: the two are bound up together. 

And that is the point. Isn’t the tale the product of the teller?    If the teller is morally flawed, won’t the flawed morality spill over into the text as well? If the teller says one thing while doing another isn’t that hypocrisy?  What of D J Enright’s poem ‘A Portrait of the Artist as Hypocrite’:

            One treats of love, and yet he beats his wife

            One hates the human race

            Yet gives his fee to waifs and strays.

If a plumber beats his wife, that is not our problem as his customers, provided his preoccupation with his domestic situation does not impinge on his fitting of our central heating.  On the other hand, to find he beats his wife is significant when it relates to the marriage guidance counsellor who is advising us.

Which is the artist: plumber (craftsman) or counsellor (moralist)? Prior to the Romantics, we would probably have said the former; with Wordsworth, the latter. 

In Renaissance times, artists were admired for their skill with words or paint or stone.   Of course, the artist’s world view could not be exempt: it would be shown in the  choice of subject matter, and in the way he (in those days, almost exclusively ‘he’) depicted it.  But the artist was, first and foremost, a craftsman.

The Romantics changed all that.  Poets had finer emotions than the norm..  They were exempt from the standards applied to ordinary people. A poet was not just someone enjoying a particular skill with words, but a great soul. We looked to a poet’s life, as well as to his/her work for guidance on how to live. 

In this, of course, Bohemians relieved from ordinary human conventions were free to be spectacularly bad.  “Epater le bourgeois.”  Baudelaire’s “poète maudit”.  In this case, the artist’s life becomes part of the entertainment value, doing things the rest of us don’t dare to do.  Teller and tale: the life and the work are inextricably bound as integral components of the total package.   Many, indeed, take far more interest in the details of a writer’s life than they do in what was actually written.   Deeds – especially salacious deeds – are much more fun than words.  I myself am not exempt from this.  I’ve never read William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch, but I do know that he shot his wife. 

 Morality – whether a writer advocates one thing and practises another - is one strand of the problem.  Another is the vexed issue of personal experience.  Can a male writer create convincing female characters?  And vice versa.  Can a middle-class writer depict a convincing working-class character?  What about other races?  What, indeed, about anybody other than oneself: assuming the reliability of one’s own perceptions. Where does it end?

 To me the valid-only-from-personal-experience standpoint is akin to the theory that you can’t know something’s wrong unless you’ve done it yourself.  But you don’t need to have done it yourself to feel that serial rape is wrong; or to be aware of the results of sticking your hand in the fire, or of eating a Destroying Angel mushroom, or the consequences for your stomach of committing hara kiri.  Accept the reality of  the gift of empathy, and you can accept that those possessing it can convey valid and realistic experiences, even if only imagined.

When I first read ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’, I assumed without question that the poet must have  been an eyewitness of the event.  I later discovered that the thing had been composed in a Cambridge college by a writer who had never been near a battlefield.  And yet the poem  probably conveys the mood of the moment much more effectively  than an offering from a real-life soldier who had been there could have done.  The poem presents a valid experience of the loss of a charismatic leader, irrespective of who wrote it.  What matters is the literary skill; not the actual experience.

When Shirley Valentine came out, innumerable women testified to how well it reflected their inner thoughts and longings.  And yet it was written by Willy Russell.

“See see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament.”   Doctor Faustus is a play with a very clear understanding of Christian doctrine, even if Marlowe himself appears to have been an atheist.  In Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte imagined emotions denied to her in real life; and yet real-life lovers have found the intensity of experience conveyed to be wholly convincing.  Similarly the speeches in which Juliet expresses her fears and longings; although Shakespeare was never a young woman.

Shakespeare was neither Jew, nor Moor, nor even an outsider; yet audiences through the ages have felt the reality of Shylock’s or Othello’s social alienation..  As far as we know, Shakespeare never murdered a king, or anyone else for that matter; yet few of us doubt the reality of Macbeth’s feelings of guilt.  There may be autobiographical elements in The Sonnets, but all the protagonists – including even the ‘I’ of the narrator – may be simply literary conventions; and the only definite truth is the ruinous effect of time.  The teller is uncertain, but we can rely on the tale about growing old. 

 

Lawrence’s theory applies to religion quite as much as to literature.   The prophets are a case in point.  Thus Jeremiah:  “The word of the Lord came to me.”  The ‘tale’ is something arising from outside, not from within..  Thus Isaiah:  “Woe is me, for  I am a man of unclean lips”.  Although he is  unfit for the message to be conveyed., the purity of the tale is separable from the frailty of the teller.  The same is true of Israel itself:  the integrity of the revealed message somehow survives even within a wayward and backsliding nation.

            “Do as I say, not as I do.”  Is religion  invalidated by the failure of those charged with its presentation to the world?  The Donatist heresy is an interesting case in point.

            The Emperor Diocletian had demanded to be worshipped.  Some Christians within the Empire refused and were duly persecuted, but other succumbed.  When the waverers later tried to be readmitted into the Church, the Donatists – named after their uncompromising bishop Donatus – refused to accept them back.  Their weakness had permanently disbarred them.

            Augustine, by contrast, cited The Lord’s  Prayer.  “Forgive us our trespasses.”  It is accepted that we will fail.  What matters is not making mistakes, but the genuineness of our contrition.  Peter’s three denials of  Christ are countered by the three affirmations to feed Christ’s sheep.  Christ’s injunction to his followers to seek perfection is an aspiration,  rather than a reality this side of death. 

As The Book of Common Prayer puts it:  “The Unworthiness of the ministers hinders not the effect of the Sacrament.”  The sacraments “...be effectual because of Christ’s institution and promise, although they be ministered by evil men.”  The tale is greater than those who tell it? 

 

As a final thought in this meander through the implications of Lawrence’s dictum, I imagine  he was also saying a writer may not fully understand his/her own work.  You do not have to subscribe to theories about the death of the author to see the validity of that viewpoint. 

            Holden Caulfield does not understand his own dream about children falling off the cliff when they come to the end of the field of rye.  As it is, he has the words wrong: there is no ‘catcher’ in the song.  Children must grow up.

            That, of course, is an imperfect analogy:  Salinger understands the significance if Holden doesn’t.   But I remember  a poem shown to me by a teenage girl about a dream she had had.  It was all about going through a doorway, and her reluctance to do so.  She asked me what I thought it meant.  Reading it, I said it was about fear of becoming an adult.  She agreed with me; although that had not been her conscious intention. 

When Isaiah said “A virgin shall conceive and bear a son,”  he was thinking about King Hezekiah.  When he spoke of the suffering servant, he was probably thinking of the nation of Israel.

  When Plato wrote in The Republic of the virtuous man being punished by his society, scourged and blinded and crucified, he was thinking back to the death of Socrates.

It was later ages who saw significance in the words of Isaiah and Plato of which they themselves would probably – certainly, in the case of Plato - have been unaware.  It may be hoped that both now share – as contributors to the greatest narrative of all – that same deeper understanding enjoyed by later readers of what they originally wrote.