Storytelling: Who Has the Right to Tell the Story?

When an author engages in storytelling they inevitably engage with issues of center and periphery and the morality of how they tell the story. Who are the main characters? Are the characters doing justice to the complexity of each identity bequeathed unto them? How does this work as a whole balance empathy toward and exploitation of identity?

One must first understand the relationship between center and periphery to engage in storytelling. Each conversation held between characters alongside the personality and identity of said characters marks a choice on the author’s part to center certain topics, people, identities, or issues rooted in the physical world which inevitably pushes the ‘other’ into the periphery.

Center and periphery emerged as spatialized concepts most commonly used in contexts of urban development. Philosophers Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engles explored the relationship between town and country, albeit from very different perspectives, through the center-periphery model. Marx and Engles describe this relationship as an antagonism between two different exploitations (Farrão and Jensen-Butler, 1984). Smith, conversely, viewed this relationship as a mutually beneficial division of labor. While these debates do not directly address the issue of the center-periphery model in storytelling, they lay the groundwork for understanding the spatialization of peoples. Both schools of thought, Marxist and classical liberalism, recognize the division that is created by different spheres of activity.

The importance of spatialization is thus that center and periphery exist only in relation to one another. Periphery is then the location that enables the phenomenological existence of the center as a power structure. Dr. Touloumi, professor of Architectural History at Bard College, expands on the ideological border between them positing that “periphery becomes essential to the existence of the center as the threshold of this power, the threshold of the center” (Touloumi, 2005, p.2).

How authors navigate the thresholds between the marginalized and the centered serves as a route for the narration that criticizes the very existence of the chasm. Gian-Paolo Biasin asserts that “[literary] criticism is also, necessarily and not contradictorily, an autobiography”. In the endeavor to critique, one inserts a piece of themselves, their own life experiences to the work. In this article, Biasin focuses on the work of critics in the modern literary world and postulates that criticism can be narration. Through Pahor's work, the converse becomes more true: narration as criticism.

In autobiographical, narrative work like that of Pahor the ways in which the story is approached creates new centers and explores existent peripheries. In bringing the margins to the center, by detailing struggles of the marginalized, Pahor simultaneously creates space for the personal identities of people on the periphery and concretizes the existence of the periphery. He asserts that the minority experience is valuable and deserving of equal recognition as the communities and stories of those in power at any given time.

“The guide's calm voice accompanies me, though he still stands by the oven. This, he says through the loud speaker, is the room where executions took place. Notice how the floor is gently sloped to allow the victims' blood torun off. In September 1944, one hundred and eight members of the Alsatian resistance perished in this room. Yes, he's talking about the one ninety-year-old man and all those women. I shove my way to the door, annoyed by the crowd and his voice, but when I reach the next room, there he is beside me again with his explanations. This, as you see, is the dissecting table. A professor from the University of Strasbourg performed his vivisections and bacteriological experiments here, and he made a point of visiting the camp to observe the state of the deportees who received varying doses of gas in the gas chamber, some taking more, others less time to die.” (Pahor, 1967, p.39)

Pahor uses the cool, detached voice of the Vosges concentration camp guide to contrast with the vivid detail of the pains of his past as a survivor that come to him on the tour. The architects of death seem to be at the foreground of the guide’s curated monologue that is uttered without a semblance of emotion. Pahor criticizes the very fabric of the memory at and in the center. Through this narrative, he challenges the reader to pay attention to the storyteller and ask, who can tell this story? And by extension Pahor brings into question storytelling as a whole. Throughout the novel one can imagine the parallel story happening in the physical world rather than in the narrator's mind, the guide continues giving his version of the story while the reader is allowed a look into the soul of the periphery. As the guide’s voice goes silent and the narrator’s voice predominates, the periphery becomes center.

Pahor centers people historically at and in the margins through his work, which focuses on the experiences of the Slovenian community in Trieste in the early twentieth century. “Flowers for a Leper,” “Butterfly on a Coat Rack,” and “The Persimmons” are a few great examples of this. The last of the three stories, “The Persimmons” is of particular interest as it is much more subtle with its allegorical messaging. Colorful imagery guides the reader through the story, reflecting the rainbow of emotions of the main character—a barefoot little boy—as he struggles to understand his identity in relation to the outside world. Pahor’s young protagonist recalls his frustration as his little sister fails to understand why she should not eat a ripe, red persimmon thrown down to her by the yellow-haired, upper-class boy— Rico—“you didn’t know about the golden plain, nor about the barefoot boy, imprisoned and bewildered, nor about the yellow mirror on which rails, stations, and tunnels stood out” (p.8). The barefoot boy mentions the rails “stood out” in the yellow mirror. One can imagine that he, barefoot, would have blackened soles while Rico, who plays inside and owns shoes, would not. The ‘yellow mirror’ that Rico symbolically represents, highlights the inferiority of the boy who sits on the “iron railing along the rails” through contrast (p.7). The protagonist experiences jealousy and anger as he enters Rico’s golden world, but only for a moment. The story addresses the ubiquitous inner turmoil and emotional turmoil of coming of age. The colors used—red, yellow, copper, and gold—together form a reflection of the frenzied emotional state of the young boy. The boy’s feelings and the imagery of heat come to an apex at the very end of the short story as the boy recalls “the more I ran, the more my face was on fire.” Moreover, Pahor does not mention the third primary color, blue, and in doing so highlights the feeling of incompleteness that couples with the anger that accompanies the process of coming of age and not having yet understood and accepted oneself. This coming-of-age story by Pahor explores the added dimension and complexity of growing up as a lower-class Slovene in Trieste. The author addresses the question of how we become aware of our otherness by centering the experience of the “other” in a story that contains themes that are universal to the experience of growing up.

The question of who gets to tell other people’s stories is one that prevails today in a world burgeoning with complex identities and intersectional issues. Anna Holmes with the New York Times addresses this issue in the context of the HBO series “Girls,” where Lena Dunham made a decision to tell the story of four young white girls. Holmes takes issue with the fact that “the people of color who did appear on the show were played simplistically to type: An older black man was written as a mouthy homeless nuisance; a young Asian-American woman as a fiercely competitive goody two-shoes” (Holmes, 2016, p.1). She goes on to describe this stereotyping as an exploitation of “caricatures of people of color” that contrast the complex portrayal of the white women. This exploitation is a large part of criticisms of people telling the stories of communities to which they do not belong. In order to write fruitfully about people with experiences and lives different from one’s self you must toe the line between exploitation and empathy. As Holmes puts it, “the line between empathy and exploitation is not so much an issue of identity but integrity, a commitment to reckoning with all sides of a story and meeting people where they are, not where we think they should be” (p.2).

Storytelling must then deal with its own integrity, the integrity of the writer, and the integrity of its usage in order to subvert the geographical, political, or social center of the work.