Storyteller? What’s that—Didn’t we watch that ages ago? (And yeah. Lack of creativity in the title this time... oh well.)
“Storyteller,” I must admit, seemed to me a particularly difficult episode to blog about. How does it connect to the gothic? I mean, there are the obvious monsters and faceing fears elements… but there’ve been better episodes we’ve already watched while exploring those topics. Sheepishly, I must say, it’s only after reading “The Turn of the Screw” that I’ve pieced it together.
In the works we’ve read, the composition of the story is strikingly important: part of the story itself. “Carmilla” and “The Transformation” are told to us, Northanger Abby is narrated. Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Turn of the Screw all feature the use of manuscript and second or third hand re-writings or re-tellings. Dracula even manufactures it’s own publication within the story. And of all the texts we read, The Turn of the Screw most relies on and makes overt the use of storytelling, as we all are aware after that whole class spent on the prologue.
So now it isn’t any surprise that Whedon devotes an episode of “Buffy” to storytelling—it’s not merely a cool device for an innovative television series, but it is deeply rooted in the Gothic. We have that garbled, influenced narrated retelling that Andrew occasionally gives us; we have the direct recording of his camera’s images (Seward would have loved to have one of those!); we even get both of them at once (recorded narration/retelling). There is, of course, more direct action in the episode than in most of the stories we read—Jekyll and Hyde being the main text wherein a large part of it is Utterson directly observed to us in real time, and the telling of the story to the readers is not a large part of the story until we get to the manuscripts. Yet just as in this book Utterson never fully knew through direct action what was going on, but only caught glimpses through other’s accounts and letters, in the episode when we directly follow Andrew with the only thing between us and him the TV—no retellings, narrations, or recordings—we, the audience often don’t know much about what’s really going on (Is Buffy really going to kill him? What’s her plan? What’s going on?). And so that lack of knowledge save by what amount of story is told to us serves to underscore the importance of storytelling in these works.
So now it isn’t any surprise that Whedon devotes an episode of “Buffy” to storytelling—it’s not merely a cool device for an innovative television series, but it is deeply rooted in the Gothic. We have that garbled, influenced narrated retelling that Andrew occasionally gives us; we have the direct recording of his camera’s images (Seward would have loved to have one of those!); we even get both of them at once (recorded narration/retelling). There is, of course, more direct action in the episode than in most of the stories we read—Jekyll and Hyde being the main text wherein a large part of it is Utterson directly observed to us in real time, and the telling of the story to the readers is not a large part of the story until we get to the manuscripts. Yet just as in this book Utterson never fully knew through direct action what was going on, but only caught glimpses through other’s accounts and letters, in the episode when we directly follow Andrew with the only thing between us and him the TV—no retellings, narrations, or recordings—we, the audience often don’t know much about what’s really going on (Is Buffy really going to kill him? What’s her plan? What’s going on?). And so that lack of knowledge save by what amount of story is told to us serves to underscore the importance of storytelling in these works.
If I need to categorize "Storyteller" to one of the novels we read, I would say it half belongs to Carmlla, The Transformation, Northanger Abbey and The Turn of the Screw, while the other half belongs to Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Storyteller is filming the events in real time by a single character, Andrew. Although both Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were depicting story in real time, they were through the perspectives from multiple people. On the other hand, the other novels had only one storyteller, but they were a retelling of what happened sometime ago.
ReplyDelete