Today, as we finished up the documentary The Stories We Tell, I was thinking about (Sarah’s biological father) Harry’s idea that his story with Diane (Sarah’s biological mother) is just his, and doesn’t belong to anyone else. Furthermore, his idea that he was telling the truth. I felt that the way he felt about his story versus how Michael (Sarah’s unknowingly ‘adoptive’ father) felt about the story paralleled the binaries between written and oral tradition. I felt as if Harry believed his story existed in a vacuum of reality, and the draft of his story with Diane was the truth, and that it held more validity than the shared stories told in the documentary of everyone, where each voice held some weight. The documentary, to me, feels like it has more of an oral tradition to it. It all centers around one narrative, that of Diane and her life and times, but morphs with each individual perspective while retaining some key characteristics like Diane’s outgoing personality and her love for her children and such. Harry’s comment about how the multiple voices create a sense of bottomlessness with the story, and therefore a sense of falsification, was interesting. It also parallels the logic of why people often have a distaste for oral tradition: it’s difficult to distinguish one author, one voice, one truth. But don’t multiple voices decrease bias, and therefore lead us closer to this asymptote of objective authenticity everyone seems to be striving towards?
(note: I’m working from home, and for whatever reason the ubc library won’t let me log in and use the resources. But related articles to check out that I wanted to hyperlink: “Orality” by Courtney Macneil, in which she describes the differences between oral and written tradition/culture and it’s related controversies, and the book by Chamberlain titled “If this is your land, where are your stories?” where he discusses First Nations peoples and their use of stories in the creation of an ‘authentic’ culture.)
Chamberlin, J. Edward. If this is your land, where are your stories?: finding common ground. Toronto: A.A. Knopf Canada, 2003. Print.
Stories We Tell. National Film Board of Canada, 2012. DVD.
MacNeil, Courtney. “The Chicago School of Media Theory Theorizing Media since 2003.” The Chicago School of Media Theory RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 May 2014.
Hi Preet,
Thanks for your thoughtful post! Your ending question was thought provoking, and I have to say I agree with your point that multiple voices seem to somewhat decrease the chance of biases being included in the story. If there are multiple viewpoints, the audience is left with a more “complete” or whole picture at the end, because it does not just promote one person’s viewpoint (ex. how Harry believed that only he was entitled to tell “his and Diane’s” story). However, I can see how this would run the risk of “falsifying” the story, if many different voices were taken into account. I pictured this type of story-telling as almost being like a bad game of ‘telephone’, where one person says something to another and it is passed down the line. The story could become warped if the different voices play a game of ‘he said, she said’, and the audience is left not knowing which voice to believe.
– Piyasha
Hi Piyasha, I think your analogy in the last point differs from the function of a story. There is a certain truth in telephone, and that is of the exact words that begin the game. But with stories, there is no objectivity, no pure authenticity. One’s story can never be boiled down to a platonic form that is perfect, because ‘perfection’ in the explanation of a subjective experience d0esn’t really exist. Which is why I think that multiple perspectives of this subjective experience allows one to look at trends and commonalities, which allows them to inch closer to that asymptote of truth in stories